Latest - Reason.com

Open Thread

2026-05-28T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

The Stains On The Federal Judiciary

2026-05-28T06:08:17Z

A high-ranking government official has sexual relations in the workplace on multiple occasions. An article of fabric is stained. The official is asked about what happened and lies during an official investigation. But thanks to a whistleblower, the truth comes out. The official, caught in flagrante delicto, apologizes and insists it will never happen again. Sound familiar?

The saga of President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky is well known to everyone over the age of 35. (I remember downloading the Starr Report over my 56k modem when I was 14 years old.) Lewinsky, an intern, had ten sexual encounters with Clinton in the White House. Most of the meetings occurred in the Oval Office, though some occurred in the room President Trump currently uses to display MAGA swag. Lewinsky never had sexual intercourse with Clinton, but they did have oral sex. Clinton touched Lewinsky's genitals and used a cigar in an inappropriate fashion. Betty Currie, the secretary who sat outside the Oval Office, maintained her plausible deniability, and would leave the area when Lewinsky was in there. Clinton infamously stained Lewinsky's blue dress from the GAP with his fluids.

Soon, the allegations leaked out. Initially, Bill Clinton lied. In an infamous January 1998 press conference, he said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." But Linda Tripp had secretly recorded conversations with Lewinsky, and provided them to Independent Counsel Ken Starr. Only after the truth came out did Clinton change his tune. He insisted, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." President Clinton was impeached for obstruction of justice and perjury for giving false testimony in the Lewinsky investigation. Ultimately, Clinton was acquitted. After his acquittal, he was held in civil contempt by Judge Susan Webber Wright for misleading testimony before the grand jury. Clinton surrendered his Arkansas law license for five years.

Now lets turn to the "subject judge" in the Eleventh Circuit. For present purposes, I will pretend that we don't all know the judge's identity. I've spoken to several journalists and investigators today. They all concur with my analysis. The name will come out soon enough. For now, I'll just refer to this disgraced jurist as Judge Betsy.

Judge Betsy had sexual relations with a law enforcement officer in her chambers many times over the course of a year. This officer's department routinely litigated in front of the judge. This seems like a far greater risk conflict than sex with an intern. Unlike Betty Currie, who could walk away when her boss was engaging in sexual relations, Judge Betsy's poor law clerk was forced to hear "kissing sounds" and "sounds of moaning." And, much like Monica's blue dress, the clerk reported that "one of the cushions on a sofa in the Subject Judge's chambers was stained in a manner that was consistent with being caused by semen."

When the investigation began, Judge Betsy lied. She said the allegations were "outrageous" and "baseless" and denied them. She then attacked her law clerk, the whistle blower, for being late, using her phone in court, and dressing "too casual." Some chutzpah for Judge Betsy to shame her clerk's attire considering she disrobed to have sex in her chambers. This charge gives new meaning to David Lat's old blog, "underneath their robes." Remarkably, Judge Betsy blamed her law clerk for retaliating against a life-tenured federal judge. The power dynamics are completely backwards.

Judge Betsy sent two follow-up emails to the Chief District Judge. She lied: "I am astounded and confused, and have no idea what this clerk is referring to or why [the clerk] has made such allegations." Twenty minutes later, she told another lie: "I don't even know which law enforcement officer [the clerk] is referring to." Judge Betsy lied to Chief Judge Pryor: "I have never engaged in sexual intercourse in my office, nor anywhere else in the Courthouse." Judge Betsy could have taken those words right out of Bill Clinton's mouth. Much like Clinton, Judge Betsy got caught due to a whistleblower. The clerk reported the message through internal channels. Thankfully, there are no secret recordings.

The similarities, unfortunately, end here. Clinton was impeached, held in contempt, and surrendered his law license. Judge Betsy was given a slap on the wrist, and her identity was kept secret. Her punishment: she can write a vaguely-worded apology letter that will not confess any real errors, she won't have to serve on burdensome committees (that might be seen as a reward), and she can avoid all of the burdensome administrative work of being chief judge. Judge Betsy doesn't even read 70% of the civil orders she signed; this doesn't strike me as a particularly capable administrator. (I checked her docket, and she has signed orders today and yesterday; the world continues to turn.) There is no punishment at all. She obstructed the investigation, lied to several judges, and tried to retaliate against her law clerk. She only apologized when she got caught.

There are many stains on the federal judiciary. There is a stain on the couch cushion in Judge Betsy's chambers. Another stain is the flagrant abuse of discretion by Judicial Council of the Eleventh Circuit to make this reprimand private. Yet another stain was left by the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability of the Judicial Conference that affirmed this private reprimand. There are judges on both bodies that I respect, but they grossly erred here.

Of course, the biggest stain has been left by every member of the judicial apparatus who has done NOTHING to stop the stealth impeachment of Pauline Newman by Kimberly Moore. Judges can have sex in their offices, retaliate against their law clerks, lie about it, yet keep their reprimand private. But Judge Newman who has done nothing wrong hasn't been able to hear a case in years. Moore even mocks Newman by omitting her from a narcisisttic AI cartoon. Shame on them all.

What come next?

First, the House of Representatives needs to initiate impeachment proceedings for Judge Betsy. Perhaps if Judge Betsy felt some actual heat, she would take the honorable course and resign. Moreover, if the judiciary feels compelled to keep this entire matter under wraps, Congress can shine light on the entire matter. The impeachment power should include the power to subpoena records from the Judicial Council. As a generally matter, judicial records should not be subject to impeachment, but here the judges are acting in an administrative capacity pursuant to a federal statute. Under Trump v. Mazars, it would seem Congress has the power to investigate how its law is being enforced against a sitting federal judge. If the judiciary is serious about avoiding judicial impeachments, then they need to take seriously policing their own internal misconduct.

Second, Congress needs to revisit the discretion given to federal judges to police themselves. If these facts can conceivably justify keeping a reprimand private, the rules need to be changed. The public needs to know. Remember that Judge Moore tried to use "anonymity" to keep her inquisition of Judge Newman private. The subpoenas could also be used in furtherance of enacting new judicial ethics legislation. I realize much of these issues about judicial reform are partisan, but I hope all fair-minded people would agree that the punishments for Judges Newman and Betsy are not similar.

Third, the Georgia Bar needs to open a disciplinary proceeding into Judge Betsy, who remains an active member in good standing. After all the nonsense "barfare" we have seen, this would be an especially appropriate target for the disciplinary counsel to look into. Does a federal judge who has sex in chambers, and then lies to her presiding judges, have the candor and character to practice law?

Fourth, given the Judge's longtime friendship with the victorious DA, who herself had some experience with infidelity on the job, it is unlikely the Fulton County District Attorney will do anything. The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia may find worthy of investigation the Judge's false statements and misuse of government property (that, the cushions).

The post The Stains On The Federal Judiciary appeared first on Reason.com.

How the Billionaire Tax Could Make California Poorer

2026-05-28T04:02:45Z

Californians will face two competing tax measures this November. The first is the Billionaire Tax Act, a onetime, 5 percent levy on the accumulated net worth of the state's richest residents. Lesser known is the Retirement and Personal Savings Protection Act, which would draw constitutional lines around what Sacramento can and cannot tax, prohibiting new levies on retirement accounts, personal savings, and individually owned assets and banning retroactive taxation.

Everyone with even just a little bit of money set aside—not just the California billionaires targeted by the wealth tax—should understand what these two measures represent.

Start with the Billionaire Tax Act. The gap between what it promises and what it would deliver is stark. Joshua Rauh of Stanford University has run the numbers with his Hoover Institution colleagues, and the results cast doubt on the prospect of any revenue gain whatsoever.

Proponents claim the tax would raise $100 billion. Rauh's team found that billionaires have already been voting with their feet: Larry Ellison left California in 2020, and six others, including Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, departed between the proposal's announcement and Dec. 31, 2025—the day before the liability would take effect.

These departures alone reduce the measure's supposed tax revenue by nearly 40 percent before a single dollar is collected. Once migration patterns uncovered in the academic literature are applied to quieter departures, expected revenue falls to only $40 billion.

Now, factor in the normal state taxes that will no longer be collected from departing billionaires. Rauh's team calculates that by shrinking the existing tax base, the measure's "net present value" is at least a $25 billion loss for California.

Then there is the retroactivity problem. The proposal aims to tax billionaires based on residency and conduct that reaches back to January 1, long before any vote was cast. Individuals who believe they lawfully established residency elsewhere might have to fight California in court for years (at the expense of the remaining taxpayers), based on details as arbitrary as where these billionaires kept their pets or held club memberships.

The "onetime" framing of the tax deserves equal skepticism. As Rauh points out, the measure includes a constitutional authorization to lift California's cap on taxation of intangible personal property. Once that legal infrastructure exists, future wealth taxes can be imposed at any rate, at any threshold, at any time. It is, in other words, a permanent new power for the state.

The Billionaire Tax Act is so erratic and its precedent so problematic that it practically begs Californians to pay attention to the second ballot measure. All Americans' savings should be safe from such confiscation based on three clear principles.

First, fairness: When a worker sets aside after-tax income to invest for retirement, the resulting balance is not untapped revenue. To treat this savings as a fresh tax base is to tax the same dollar twice.

Second, stability: A tax system that reaches into asset values rather than income flows is inherently volatile. A founder whose stock drops 40 percent in a downturn still owes wealth tax on last year's greater valuation. An ordinary saver whose 401(k) is taxed would face the same absurdity.

Third, and most urgent, is California's own track record. According to the state's nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office, state spending is poised to grow by nearly 70 percent between 2019 and the coming fiscal year, drastically outpacing a significant revenue hike over the period. The result is a cumulative deficit exceeding $50 billion over the next two years, a hole entirely of Sacramento's own making, unrelated to Washington. Trusting politicians with that spending record to stop at taxing billionaires is reckless and naive.

When the wealth tax inevitably fails to deliver, the state will look for the next available pool of assets. Nonbillionaires who remain after California's billionaires depart will be the likely targets, and their retirement savings could be the new tax base. As Rauh wrote earlier this month in his ongoing exploration of the proposals, "While approximately 0.001% of California households are billionaires, approximately 62% have retirement accounts."

If this prediction sounds far-fetched due to federal protections—or if you think billionaires will always be treated differently than normal savers who fill retirement accounts over a lifetime—consider what California already does to health savings accounts (HSAs).

Federal law treats HSA contributions and earnings as tax-exempt. But under California's tax engineering, the interest, dividends, and capital gains are treated as ordinary income, affecting roughly 4.5 million residents. These people are not billionaires or millionaires. Politicians simply decided this was revenue the state was entitled to tax. Doing the same with 401(k)s and IRAs would not require new principles, just the same willingness.

A wealth tax on billionaires is the first step, and it puts the retirement savings of ordinary Californians at risk. The HSA precedent suggests that the threat is real. The Retirement and Personal Savings Protection Act would erect constitutional barriers against exactly that kind of expansion.

The post How the Billionaire Tax Could Make California Poorer appeared first on Reason.com.

A Prescient Poem About AI

2026-05-27T23:51:31Z

A post jocularly characterizing AIs as our children reminded me of this stanza from Philip Larkin:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

The post A Prescient Poem About AI appeared first on Reason.com.

The Other Vindictive Part of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's Case

2026-05-28T05:04:25Z

The criminal prosecution against Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the Salvadoran national whose story became a flashpoint last year in the immigration debate—must be dismissed, a federal judge ruled last week, finding it had been tainted unconstitutionally by vindictiveness. The Justice Department, vowing to appeal, said in a statement that "another activist judge has placed politics above public safety."

It is an ironic accusation. Abrego Garcia may be guilty of smuggling people across the border. But the indictment against him, in connection with a 2022 traffic stop and ensuing investigation that had been closed without charges, was always about politics above public safety. It is not a mystery. The confirmation came from the Trump administration itself, in ways that extend beyond the scope of the ruling. Most revealing is that he could likely have been deported long ago.

Abrego Garcia emerged as a symbol of illegal migration, and the federal government's approach to combating it, in March 2025 after the administration sent him to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador. It had done so as the result of an "administrative error," said the government, which was forced to concede that he had a withholding of removal to the very country it had removed him to. The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland ultimately ruled that the executive branch was obligated to "facilitate" his return, which the Supreme Court unanimously confirmed.

The news cycle set off a political battle that was, in many ways, much bigger than one person. Government leaders denounced Abrego Garcia or made entreaties on his behalf; that included Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D–Md.), who went to El Salvador and met with him in person.

Abrego Garcia returned to the United States in June. It was not the ideal outcome for the Trump administration, which had claimed it had no power to bring him back. This time, however, he was under criminal indictment. "We got him out of here," Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general, told Fox News' Laura Ingraham that month. (Blanche has since been promoted to the top job.) "And a judge in Maryland and many members of Congress…questioned that decision" to deport him. So the government "started…investigating him."

That admission would prove fatal in court. "Blanche's words directly confirm that the Executive Branch reopened the criminal investigation because the Judicial Branch required the Executive Branch to facilitate Abrego's return from El Salvador," writes Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. "The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego's successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution. The Executive Branch closed its investigation on the November 2022 traffic stop. Only after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his rights did the Executive Branch reopen that investigation."

But while the ruling does not touch on it, a vindictive spirit infects another part of Abrego Garcia's story—one few people have discussed—which further complicates the claim that this is about "public safety" rather than "politics."

Lost on many is that the Costa Rican government agreed to accept Abrego Garcia in August. The country has a standing agreement with the U.S. to take deportees who cannot be removed to their home countries. The federal government was, originally, fine with this plan—it was the one that raised it as an offer. But it came as a condition of a plea deal with the (now-dismissed) criminal indictment. When Abrego Garcia declined to plead guilty, the Trump administration moved to exact punishment another way: by instead deporting him to Uganda.

The problem: Uganda did not agree to take him. So the federal government pivoted to Eswatini. That country had "not received any communication regarding this person," Eswatini's spokesperson, Thabile Mdluli, said in a statement after news broke. No such agreement would come to fruition. The Trump administration then did another about-face, this time to Ghana.

"Ghana is not accepting Abrego Garcia," Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, its minister for foreign affairs, said in October. "He cannot be deported to Ghana."

At a court hearing shortly thereafter, the government announced it would seek to send Abrego Garcia to Liberia, which agreed on a "temporary" basis. Costa Rica was not an option anymore, the Trump administration told the court, because it no longer "wish[ed] to receive him."

That was news to Costa Rica. "That position that we have expressed in the past," Mario Zamora Cordero—Costa Rica's minister of public security—said in November, "remains valid and unchanged to this day."

Yet the Trump administration has instead opted to spend taxpayer dollars prolonging this—not because there is no viable deportation plan, but because officials want to wait for one that will inflict maximum suffering. In his ruling, Crenshaw wrote that the government did not explain its "change in position to remove Abrego and not prosecute him to then prosecute and not remove him." The question unfortunately answers itself.

The post The Other Vindictive Part of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's Case appeared first on Reason.com.

Who Is The District Court Judge Who Was Privately Reprimanded For Having Loud Sex In Her Chambers With A Law Enforcement Officer From Her District?

2026-05-27T21:22:01Z

On February 11, the Judicial Council of the Eleventh Circuit published an order with remarkable conclusions: a federal district court judge somewhere in the Eleventh Circuit "engag[ed] in an extramarital affair with a law enforcement officer and, in the course of the affair, having sexual intercourse in the Subject Judge's office during work hours and within hearing distance of the judge's clerks." Ultimately, however, the Council issues a private reprimand, rather than a public reprimand. The identity of the judge is not disclosed. But many of the clues in the memorandum point to a particular judge.

First, we can easily narrow down which of the three states in the Eleventh Circuit is at issue. The order refers to a "victory party for a District Attorney" in 2024 the night before "the judge's summer interns' first day." Florida does not have District Attorneys; they are called State Attorneys. So we are down to Alabama and Georgia. In 2024, the Alabama primary was on March 4 and the primary runoff was on April 16. Those dates don't match with when a summer intern would start. In Georgia, the primary was on May 21, 2024. That date matches up well with the start of a summer internship.

Second, the memorandum indicates that the subject judge is not currently the Chief Judge of the District. The memorandum further states that the chambers of the chief judge are "configured almost identically to the Subject Judge's chambers," which suggests the chief judge and the subject judge are in the same building. Georgia is divided into a Northern District, a Middle District, and a Southern District. The Chief Judge of the Southern District is stationed in Savannah. He appears to be the only active status judge stationed in that building. The Chief Judge of the Middle District is stationed in Albany. No other active status judges are stationed in Albany. As best as I can tell, all of the active Northern District Judges have chambers in the Richard B. Russell building in Atlanta. (I visited that high-rise tower in 2008 when I interviewed with Jack Camp, another disgraced NDGA judge.) And it would stand to reason that chambers on different floors would have similar layouts. It seems very likely that the subject judge is stationed in Atlanta.

Third, the reprimand states that this judge would "forego service as chief judge should the Subject Judge be otherwise eligible to serve in that cap." The current chief judge's tenure will expire, at the latest, in May 2032. There are several active duty judges in the Northern District of Georgia who could, in theory, be eligible to become chief judge in 2032. But that list is fairly small.

Fourth, there was a very high profile District Attorney race in Atlanta that was settled on May 21, 2024: Fani Willis won the Democratic primary for the Fulton County District Attorney. Yes, Fani Willis is the prosecutor who indicted Donald Trump and his associates for alleged election interference. There were many press reports about Willis's victory in the 2024 Democratic primary. The memorandum makes several references to martinis. For example, "the Subject Judge explained that the judge had consumed too many martinis the night before at the primary election victory party for a District Attorney." Moreover, "Based on news coverage, including video and photos, the District Attorney's campaign held an election watch party at which drinks or food in martini glasses appeared to have been served." Well, there were certainly martinis at Willis's party. Here is a photo of Nathan Wade at Willis's victory party from Fox 5 Atlanta. In the background you can see a martini glass. For those who do not recall, Wade resigned as special prosecutor in the Trump case after admitting to having an affair with Willis.

If you watch the video of her celebration, you can see martini glasses on the waiter's tray.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution has another photo of a woman next to Wade holding a martini. The AP has many more.

Fifth, the memorandum states that the "Subject Judge acknowledged having been friends with a District Attorney since 1999." The judge also had "former district attorney's office colleagues" at the victory party. The memorandum further relays, "The Subject Judge stated that, on one occasion, at the District Attorney's invitation, the judge went to a 'mixer' of former employees of a District Attorney's Office—where the Subject Judge previously worked."

The reprimand also disqualified the judge from being chief judge, which would rule out any senior status judges or judges who have already aged out of being chief judge. How many judges of the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta could have plausibly been friends with Fani Willis since 1999, worked in the Fulton County District Attorney's Office, and could still be in line to be chief judge? There is only one judge who checks all of those boxes: District Court Judge Eleanor Ross.

Let's start with her background. From 1998 to 2002, she served as a senior assistant district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia. That would have given her a chance to work with Fani Willis, who was an assistant district attorney during that time. After a stint in the U.S. Attorney's office, Ross returned to Fulton County as an Executive Assistant District Attorney. She was appointed to the state bench in 2011, and President Obama nominated her for the federal bench in 2014. It stands to reason that she would still be in touch with her former prosecutor colleagues from about 15 years ago. I checked the biographies of the other active duty judges in NDGA, and none served in the Fulton County District Attorney's Office.

District Court Judge Eleanor Ross was born in December 1967. She is next in line to be Chief Judge based on seniority. (There is one judge ahead of her who has been on the bench longer, but he has already aged out.) In May 2032, Ross will be short of 65 years old, and would be eligible to become Chief Judge.

The memorandum further states that on the day after the DA's victory party, "Subject Judge presided over a criminal revocation proceeding." Indeed, Judge Ross presided over a revocation of supervised release on May 22, 2024 at 11:30 AM in 1:23-cr-350.

I cannot know for certain if Judge Ross is the subject judge, but a lot of evidence points in that direction. I emailed Judge Ross's courtroom deputy seeking a comment from the judge, but did not receive a response. I will post any response Judge Ross sends.

The post Who Is The District Court Judge Who Was Privately Reprimanded For Having Loud Sex In Her Chambers With A Law Enforcement Officer From Her District? appeared first on Reason.com.

DoJ Sues UCLA for Allegedly Tolerating Discrimination and Harassment Against Jews and Israelis, Seeks Return of Federal Grants

2026-05-27T20:48:03Z

Read the Complaint for more on the factual allegations and on the remedy the DoJ seeks. The Introduction:

On April 25, 2024, following months of antisemitic and anti-Israeli demonstrations, masked and armed agitators, many of whom were openly hostile to Jews and Israelis, occupied the heart of the University of California, Los Angeles ("UCLA") campus. They built an illegal encampment, surrounded it with barriers, and formed "human phalanxes" to block Jews and Israelis from entering academic buildings. They kicked and slapped Jews, beat Jews with sticks, and assaulted Jews with pepper spray. One Jewish student was knocked unconscious and was taken to the hospital with an open head wound.

Although UCLA knew that its Jewish and Israeli students risked physical assault when attempting to go to class or the library, UCLA inexplicably took no serious action whatsoever until May 2, 2024, when it finally allowed police to clear the encampment. Chaos ensued. Law-enforcement officers "were met with bursts of pepper spray, protesters wielding fire extinguishers against them, bright strobe lights, and protesters wearing helmets and goggles."

UCLA's own Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias ("Task Force"), published a damning report (Ex. A) concluding that UCLA's "leadership allowed the encampment and related denial of campus access to continue" and "officials continued to refuse to break up the encampment even after the protesters denied Jews and others free passage and access to campus classrooms and facilities." UCLA's leadership apparently preferred a do-nothing "de-escalation strategy" to protecting their Jewish and Israeli students from an angry mob organized by peers armed with tasers, lumber, and a sword.

This Court already has found that UCLA's non-response to the horror inflicted on Jewish and Israeli students was "unimaginable" and "abhorrent." {Frankel v. Regents of Univ. of Cal., 744 F. Supp. 3d 1015, 1020 (C.D. Cal. 2024).} It correctly held that UCLA likely violated the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause by excluding Jews from campus buildings, thoroughfares, and resources. UCLA's decision to ignore the harassment of, and discrimination against, Jewish and Israeli students also violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race and national-origin discrimination in higher education.

UCLA's top administrators knew that armed demonstrators beat up Jews and physically prevented Jewish and Israeli students from attending class. The Office of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion ("EDI office") received over one hundred complaints about antisemitism and anti-Israeli hostility but routinely ignored these complaints. In short, UCLA was deliberately indifferent to the suffering of its Jewish and Israeli students and declined to take meaningful action to protect them. Its behavior exemplifies the deliberate indifference towards discrimination that Title VI prohibits.

UCLA failed to protect its Jewish and Israeli students. The United States brings this action to compel UCLA to comply with Title VI, to recover the taxpayer subsidies the United States awarded to this discriminatory institution, and to require UCLA to reform its antidiscrimination procedures to ensure that all complaints of discrimination against and harassment of Jewish and Israeli students are properly investigated and addressed.

The post DoJ Sues UCLA for Allegedly Tolerating Discrimination and Harassment Against Jews and Israelis, Seeks Return of Federal Grants appeared first on Reason.com.

Does Reporting Bad News About the Iran War Make You a Foreign Agent?

2026-05-27T20:36:15Z

The Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to censor bad news about the Iran war. President Donald Trump even accused journalists of treason during the war. Now the administration has found a specific (if extremely tenuous) legal justification for his claims: the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

After The Bulwark journalist Tim Miller shared someone else's paraphrase of an Iranian TV news report about the ceasefire negotiations, the official White House Rapid Response account on X commented that Miller is "starting to take Iranian state media as fact and peddle disinformation on their behalf. Maybe Tim should register under FARA for being an agent of a foreign country."

On its face, Miller's criticism falls far outside of FARA. All he did was comment on a public report. But it wouldn't be the first time the federal government tried to weaponize FARA against domestic critics.

Passed in 1938 to root out Nazi agents, the law requires anyone conducting political activities "at the order, request, or under the direction or control" of a foreign power to register publicly or face jail time or fines.

In 1951, the Department of Justice tried to prosecute civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois under FARA for republishing an international communist-led petition against nuclear weapons. A judge threw out the case after prosecutors failed to present evidence of any concrete Soviet ties. Since then, the government has mostly used FARA to prosecute foreign spies short of the Espionage Act, to add another layer of red tape to foreign lobbying, and to throw the book at corruption schemes involving foreigners.

Still, the law is "strikingly sweeping, capturing much other conduct that most people would not think should be registrable," according to a 2022 article in Just Security, which recommended narrowing the foreign-agent law to avoid abuse. The Department of Justice once required an American church to register as a foreign agent for bringing foreign congregants to the March for Life rally in Washington, D.C. Until 2024, the department also considered paid tourism promoters foreign agents.

The first Trump administration pushed Russian, Chinese, and Qatari news outlets to register as foreign agents. The nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists accused the Department of Justice of using FARA as a political cudgel and undermining freedom of the press.

The threat against Miller seems to confirm critics' worst fears about FARA. And it is also the latest attempt by the Trump administration to browbeat journalists out of reporting on the Iran war. Miller struck a nerve by pointing out that the reported U.S. peace offer falls far short of Trump's war goals, and might have put the U.S. in a worse position than it was before Trump attacked. The White House lashed out at Miller without actually saying what was false about the report.

During the war, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to yank TV stations' licenses for spreading "fake news." That threat was directed at a Wall Street Journal article about damage to U.S. aircraft that turned out to be true. And it was ultimately an empty threat.

But even raising the possibility of legal punishment—and directing it at individual citizens—is a heavy cudgel for the government to wield. Last year, the official U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) account accused CATO Institute Director of Immigration Studies David Bier of inciting "DAILY assaults" on federal agents for sharing an NBC News report about an ICE shooting. The Department of Homeland Security told Reason that filming ICE agents "sure sounds like obstruction of justice."

The point is not to have an airtight legal case that can be used to prosecute critics. The point is to exploit the vagueness of the law to terrorize people out of speaking up in the first place.

The post Does Reporting Bad News About the Iran War Make You a Foreign Agent? appeared first on Reason.com.

Ken Paxton's Primary Victory Shows How Trump's Grudges Undermine His Party's Interests

2026-05-27T20:23:41Z

In the first round of the Republican U.S. Senate primary in Texas on March 3, John Cornyn, the incumbent, prevailed over his closest competitor, outgoing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, by about two points. But in the second round on Tuesday, Paxton trounced Cornyn, winning 64 percent of the vote in the head-to-head match.

Since the candidates disqualified in the first round received less than 17 percent of the vote in total, that is a pretty striking reversal. The only factor that can plausibly explain it is President Donald Trump's last-minute endorsement of Paxton, which he announced one week before Texans cast their ballots.

Paxton's victory is further evidence that Trump, despite his low approval ratings in national polls, retains enough sway over Republican primary voters to defeat candidates he deems insufficiently loyal to him. But a party organized around one man's petty vendettas may face problems down the road, as illustrated by the challenge of persuading Texas voters to pick Paxton, a divisive and scandal-plagued Trump devotee, over Democratic nominee James Talarico in November.

Until Tuesday, Cornyn, who previously served as a district court judge, a Texas Supreme Court justice, and the state's attorney general, had never lost an election. He was first elected to the Senate in 2002, when he won 55 percent of the vote. He repeated that performance when he ran for reelection in 2008, received 62 percent of the vote in 2014, and got 54 percent in 2020. During his four terms in the Senate, which included a stint as majority whip, Cornyn had a solidly conservative record, earning an 85 percent lifetime rating from the CPAC Foundation.

Explaining why he decided to oppose a veteran legislator who seemed like the surest bet to help Republicans retain their Senate majority, Trump described Paxton as "an America First Patriot" who "has always been extremely loyal to me and our AMAZING MAGA MOVEMENT." While Cornyn is "a good man," Trump said, "he was not supportive of me when times were tough" and "was very late in backing me in what turned out to be a Historic Run for the Republican Nomination."

Cornyn's sins against Trump include his comments during the 2016 presidential race. "We can't have a nominee be an albatross around the down-ballot races," he told CNN in February 2016. "That's a concern of mine." Trump "certainly is a controversial figure," he added. "I think we need someone who can unify the party, as opposed to divide the party."

After Trump took office in 2017, Cornyn nevertheless was a reliable defender of his policies and conduct. "Cornyn has proved to be an immutable Trump ally throughout the president's first term in the White House," the Texas Observer noted in February 2020, adding that the senator "extended that allegiance when he eagerly took on the role of a top Trump surrogate" after the president's first impeachment. But Cornyn sinned again later that year in a pre-election interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Describing his relationship with Trump, Cornyn said he felt "like a lot of women who get married and think they're going to change their spouse, and that doesn't usually work out very well." He added: "I think what we found is that we're not going to change President Trump. He is who he is. You either love him or hate him, and there's not much in between. What I tried to do is not get into public confrontations and fights with him because, as I've observed, those usually don't end too well." But he acknowledged that he had privately disagreed with the president on issues such as tariffs, the budget deficit, and the legally dubious diversion of funds to pay for Trump's border wall.

Despite that mild expression of dissent, Cornyn defended Trump after the 2021 Capitol riot, criticizing the resulting impeachment. "Incitement involves a state of mind and intention," he said. "I am not seeing anything to indicate that the president intended to initiate a riot on the Capitol." Cornyn tried to prevent the Senate from weighing the impeachment, arguing that it was unconstitutional to try a former president. Unsurprisingly, he was one of the 43 Republicans who voted to acquit Trump.

By 2023, however, Cornyn was publicly expressing concern about the prospect of nominating Trump again. "I think President Trump's time has passed him by," he said that May. "I don't think President Trump understands that when you run in a general election, you have to appeal to voters beyond your base." He suggested that Republicans should reject Trump in favor of "a candidate who can actually win."

Desperate to make up for his past heresies, Cornyn did whatever he could to ingratiate himself with the president and his supporters. "I voted with President Trump 99% of the time," he bragged. He touted that "99% alignment" in a campaign ad, saying he had steadfastly worked with Trump to "strengthen the border," "defend law enforcement," and "protect Texas jobs."

Cornyn "posted a photo of himself" reading Trump's book The Art of the Deal, the Associated Press notes. "He proposed legislation to rename a stretch of interstate in Trump's honor. Perhaps most glaringly, the Senate institutionalist who long supported the filibuster reversed his position in a failed effort to advance voting restrictions that are a priority for the president."

None of that was enough. Trump's grudge against Cornyn prevailed over a cool assessment of Paxton's chances against Talarico, which look iffy in light of Paxton's legal and ethical scrapes.

In July 2015, six months after Paxton took office as attorney general, a state grand jury indicted him on three felony charges stemming from his sales of shares in the technology company Servergy. Prosecutors alleged that Paxton had defrauded investors by failing to disclose that he was receiving commissions on the stock sales. Paxton ultimately avoided trial by agreeing to pay $300,000 in restitution, complete 200 hours of community service, and take 15 hours of training in legal ethics. Although that 2024 deal did not include an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, it was certainly not a good look for the state's top law enforcement officer.

In May 2023, the Texas House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to impeach Paxton based on allegations that he had abused his office to benefit real estate developer Nate Paul, a campaign donor. The 20 articles of impeachment included charges that Paxton had improperly issued legal opinions that favored Paul, attempted to intervene in foreclosure lawsuits, retaliated against whistleblowers on his staff, and obstructed justice. After the impeachment, Paxton was suspended from office for more than three months. But that September, the state Senate acquitted Paxton by a 16–14 vote following a trial run by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Paxton ally and donor.

Last July, Paxton's wife of 38 years, state Sen. Angela Paxton (R–Plano), announced that she had filed for divorce "on biblical grounds," alleging adultery. "I believe marriage is a sacred covenant and I have earnestly pursued reconciliation," she said. "But in light of recent discoveries, I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage." The attorney general suggested that "countless political attacks" had contributed to the rupture, but he did not deny his wife's claims. "I ask for your prayers and privacy at this time," he said.

In addition to that baggage, to which Cornyn repeatedly alluded during his primary campaign, Paxton has taken legal positions that surely endeared him to Trump but may be less appealing to Texas voters in the general election. In December 2020, Paxton filed what Reason's Damon Root described as "a frivolous and error-riddled lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to directly intervene in the 2020 election by throwing out the results in four states—Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin—that went for President-elect Joe Biden."

Four days later, Root noted, "the Supreme Court wiped that nonsense from its docket with the eagerness of someone wiping dog excrement from the bottom of a shoe." Without rehashing the bogus election-fraud claims that had made no headway in the courts, the justices simply noted that "Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections."

Paxton's eagerness to promote Trump's stolen-election fantasy in defiance of the facts and the law may not play well in the general election. According to a University of Houston survey conducted a month after the Capitol riot, 55 percent of Texans rejected Trump's claims of systematic election fraud. And according to recent polls, half of Texas voters take a dim view of Trump, compared to 42 percent who view him favorably.

Although it is less likely to matter with voters, Paxton's disregard for civil liberties also counts against him. In 2023, Paxton launched a fraud investigation of Media Matters for America based on the organization's reporting about "pro-Nazi content" on Twitter (now X). After Media Matters challenged that investigation on First Amendment grounds, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed that decision in May 2025, saying Media Matters was the "target of a government campaign of retaliation" and an "arguably bad faith investigation" that infringed "exercise of their First Amendment rights" and imposed "special burdens on their newsgathering activities and operation of their media company."

In 2024, Paxton urged the Supreme Court to reject a petition from Laredo journalist Priscilla Villarreal, who was arrested on felony charges in 2017 because she had asked a police officer to confirm information about two newsworthy events: a public suicide and a fatal car accident. Villarreal's questions, Paxton averred, were "akin to incitement." And even if her arrest violated the First Amendment, he said, the cops had no way of knowing that.

Last month, Paxton sued the city of Houston in response to an ordinance that reminded local police officers of their obligation to respect the Fourth Amendment. By reiterating the restrictions that the Supreme Court has imposed on police detention of motorists and pedestrians, he claimed, Houston had violated a state law against local interference with immigration enforcement.

Even if Texas voters are not inclined to research Paxton's record on civil liberties, they may be swayed by the widely publicized allegations of securities fraud, corruption, and adultery. "Few politicians have garnered as much scandal in Texas as Paxton," The Washington Post notes. You can be sure that Talarico, who calls Paxton "the most corrupt politician in America," is glad to be facing off against him rather than Cornyn.

For much the same reason, Senate Republicans are nervous about Paxton's prospects. Recent polls suggest the race is very close at this point. Even if Paxton ultimately wins, the extra money that will be needed to counter the ethical case against him will draw resources from other races in a year when 20 Republican seats are up for election, compared to 13 Democratic seats.

Cornyn was clearly the safer choice for Republicans keen to maintain their Senate majority. But Trump has rarely allowed political calculations to interfere with his personal grievances.

The post Ken Paxton's Primary Victory Shows How Trump's Grudges Undermine His Party's Interests appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump's Trade War Caused a $15 Billion Decline in U.S. Farm Sales to China

2026-05-27T20:05:04Z

When President Donald Trump announced broad and arbitrary import taxes last April—tariffs that the Supreme Court would later determine were illegal—he said they would uplift domestic producers, even though many economists predicted the opposite. More than a year later, Americans can safely say that the economists were right.

Trump's tariffs have not only failed in their central aim—to bring manufacturing jobs back to America—they've also hurt Americans across a range of economic sectors, including agriculture.

That's the latest analysis from the North Dakota State University (NDSU) Agricultural Trade Monitor, which recently found that between March 2025 and February 2026, annualized U.S. agricultural exports to China dropped by nearly $15 billion. This is almost $5 billion more in lost trade to China than what American farmers saw during the first Trump administration.

The market for soybeans was especially hard-hit. In 2024, more than $12 billion worth of American soybeans were sent to China. In 2025, that figure declined by three-quarters to just $3 billion. The Trade Monitor estimates that $6.8 billion worth of the drop was caused directly by Trump's trade war, which saw tariffs on Chinese goods rise from 20 percent to 135 percent, before falling to around 50 percent last year. China retaliated in kind, levying a 147 percent, and later a 32 percent tariff, on American agricultural exports.

While most American farmers have suffered under Trump's tariff regime, the study found that the trade war's effects were especially concentrated "in the Corn Belt, Great Plains, California, and Texas." Iowa farmers took the biggest hit: $1.2 billion worth of China-bound exports were impacted.

The study's authors caution that their "estimates measure lost exports to China, not lost exports overall." Some of the corn, wheat, soy, and pork that would have otherwise been sold to Chinese customers was probably redirected to Mexico, Canada, or Japan instead, where the farmers made some of their money back. But certainly not all of it: In December, Trump authorized an $11 billion farm bailout, a tacit admission that his economic policies—largely defined by the trade war with China—have failed to make American farmers better off.

We may soon know precisely how many billions of dollars Trump's trade war has cost them: "A companion analysis…is in preparation," the NDSU authors write, which will take redirected trade outflows into account.

Despite the losses that farmers suffered in 2025, some hope remains. The study's authors write that if the framework produced at a recent summit in Beijing is implemented, agricultural exports could rebound quickly and even "exceed the 2024 export level by approximately $4 to $5 billion." But the Chinese government has not confirmed its commitment to the scheme, and farmers are unsure if it will ever come to fruition.

Their fears are understandable. As the last year has shown, Trump's trade agreements often come with empty promises, while his ability to execute plans beneficial to the American economy cannot be counted upon.

The post Trump's Trade War Caused a $15 Billion Decline in U.S. Farm Sales to China appeared first on Reason.com.

James Talarico's Fake Olive Branch to Republicans

2026-05-27T18:11:19Z

To read some of the press coverage, one would think the biggest winner of yesterday's Texas Republican primary runoff is James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate. He now gets to run against the scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton as opposed to the steady old-hand incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas).

Talarico himself wasted no time in seeking advantage in Cornyn's loss to Paxton by issuing an X post saying that the senator's supporters are welcome in his campaign.

I want to thank Senator John Cornyn for his years representing our state.

We don't agree on everything, but we both still believe in public service.

To Senator Cornyn's supporters: you have a place in our campaign.

— James Talarico (@jamestalarico) May 27, 2026

This got a lot of praise on social media from liberals, who are once again indulging the hope that, with a compelling candidate of their own and a deeply flawed GOP nominee on the other side, Texas might at last turn blue.

Smart tweet from a smart politician https://t.co/cWWL2eX8Zo

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) May 27, 2026

This is how it's done. https://t.co/K6qI1PC6h6

— Charlotte Clymer (@cmclymer) May 27, 2026

Just a reminder, Beto only lost by 2 https://t.co/RY8mBzdVBS

— Neera Tanden (@neeratanden) May 27, 2026

In truth, Talarico's outreach to Cornyn supporters is not particularly strong evidence of his political genius. One would have to be a pretty bad politician to try to pick up some disaffected Republicans after a bruising primary fight.

His olive branch is also far less impressive when one considers how substanceless it really is.

While he's dressed it up in conciliatory language, Talarico's message to Republicans is still a negative, partisan one: vote for me because the other guy is way worse.

In the post-primary interviews he's given, he's notably not offered any new moderation of his policy stances. Talarico's comments instead focus almost entirely on Paxton's many legal and personal scandals. His social media feed, minus the one bit of outreach to Cornyn voters, is the same story.

As The Washington Post's Dominic Pino points out with select screenshots from Talarico's issues page on his campaign website, the Democratic candidate is still running as a liberal Democrat.

Based on this post, you might think Talarico has adopted some moderate policy positions to win over GOP voters.

But check out his website and he's running as a party-line Democrat. https://t.co/6atn9TG1ok pic.twitter.com/i5rV2JLURd

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) May 27, 2026

He still wants to hike taxes and the minimum wage. He still wants to make everyone eligible for Medicare. He still wants aggressive antitrust enforcement. He's still hostile to school choice and in favor of abortion.

Talarico's only real pitch to conservative voters then is that he is less personally corrupt than the Republican candidate who backs the policies they generally agree with. Even if he makes that pitch with a smile, it's still a negative appeal to voters who aren't already in his camp.

This isn't particularly surprising coming from Talarico. Any hand he extends to conservatives always has a wagging finger on it telling them to get in line.

He'll talk up his credentials as a Presbyterian seminarian and, in the same breath, quote noncanonical Gospels and claim the Annunciation is a pro-abortion parable.

But he's not the only Democrat to dress up negative partisanship as wholesome moderation. The party has a problem with this generally.

Recall that Joe Biden, when he was still running for a second term, made staged pleas for ordinary Republicans to split off from MAGA and join him in saving the Republic. Kamala Harris ended her doomed presidential campaign with a very similar message.

The trouble was that neither Harris nor Biden's pitch to anti-Donald Trump and Trump-skeptical Republicans included any policy concessions. Biden governed as the most left-wing president of my lifetime and would have continued to do so if he had won.

He was not offering Republicans a seat at the table in his second term. Rather, he was saying that they needed to abandon any hope of advancing conservative policy priorities because Trump is personally so much worse.

That pitch might have worked for Biden in 2020, when he also ran as the decent moderate trying to reclaim the "soul" of the nation from Trumpian chaos and nastiness. When none of that campaign trail moderation was reflected in Biden administration policy, plenty of voters decided that maybe the chaos and nastiness were a price worth paying to avoid another four years of hardline progressive governance.

Odds are most Cornyn-supporting GOP voters will make a similar calculation and line up behind Paxton, even if they do believe he's a slimeball.

None of this should be construed as a defense of Paxton or Trump, two men who are manifestly unqualified to hold electoral office.

But if Democrats are going to ask Republicans to surrender some ground on their policy priorities in order to keep manifestly unqualified candidates out of office, they need to be willing to do the same.

Talarico's latest olive branch is more proof that they're not willing to build a genuine big tent.

Obviously, a moderate Democrat (or, for that matter, a corruption-free Republican) is not this libertarian's ideal lawmaker. I want a politics that leads to smaller government, instead of one that just tacks to the center to keep the crooks out.

But we're not going to get steady, small government administration if one party keeps nominating scoundrels and the other sees that as a license to pursue their own hardline agenda.

The post James Talarico's Fake Olive Branch to Republicans appeared first on Reason.com.

5 Bills Signed by Wes Moore That Will Impact Housing and AI Development in Maryland

2026-05-27T16:07:44Z

On Tuesday, Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore signed over 270 bills into law. With public scrutiny focused on bills related to crime and immigration, several bills that expand government to address housing shortages and integrate AI into public education have flown under the radar. Here are five examples.

1. The Maryland Housing Certainty Act

Maryland faces a housing shortage of about 100,000 units. To keep pace with its growing population, the state would need an additional 590,186 units by 2045, according to the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. At first glance, the Maryland Housing Certainty Act appears to be a fix to the issue by targeting one of the main barriers to housing construction: ever-changing regulations that increase uncertainty for developers.

It's a high bar, considering Maryland is the sixth most regulated state for housing development, with construction costs 27 percent higher than the national average. Previously, housing projects were subject to changes in local regulations, even with prior approval.

The act freezes local zoning laws and land use policies for housing developments, allowing only regulations applicable "at the time of submission" to be considered for project approval. The law also prohibits the collection of development impact fees and excise taxes until after a project is complete, smartly reducing the front-loaded costs of new construction and reducing a barrier to market entry for smaller developers.

Unfortunately, the bill ostensibly undermines its efforts at deregulation by doubling down on local jurisdictions' ability to "require approvals or permits for each phase of a housing development project."

Maryland approved roughly 3,500 fewer permits in 2025 than the previous year—despite admissions from its housing department that the state's current permitting structure only increases "housing cost burdens," causing residents to "leave the state to find housing."

Instead of cutting regulations that prolong the completion of housing projects, the act merely trades one layer of government control for another.

2. The Maryland Transit and Housing Opportunity Act

In the Maryland Transit and Housing Opportunity Act, lawmakers rightly recognize that density restrictions and parking requirements are common regulatory tactics used to prevent the construction of new housing.

The act designates housing projects centered around public transit areas as "enterprise zones," subsidizing their development with property and income tax credits. It also includes prohibitions on land-use restrictions for publicly owned land. It prevents local jurisdictions from imposing "off-street parking requirements" on development projects within a quarter mile of a public transportation hub.

Still, the bill makes clear that none of its provisions should be seen as limiting a local jurisdiction's authority to deny projects based on "environmental or natural resources concerns," "public health and safety considerations," or "adequate public facilities ordinances," meaning developments can still be denied if the government deems it lacks local infrastructure like schools, roads, water, sewer, and EMS. Meanwhile, the use of tax credits equates to the government picking winners and losers based on location and artificially propping up housing developments that might otherwise fail.

3. The Maryland Fair Chance Housing Act

Any Maryland landlord that "manages or owns five or more residential rental units" is now prohibited from requiring their prospective tenants to submit to drug or alcohol tests until a conditional offer is made. Landlords in the state are also barred from "requesting or requiring" prospective tenants to consent to the release of information about drug prevention or treatment programs. Under the Maryland Fair Chance Housing Act, if a landlord checks the criminal history of one prospective tenant, he "must do so for every prospective tenant."

Rental leases are voluntary agreements. The bill unnecessarily usurps the judgment of private landowners for the government's. Red tape, such as the bills' mandatory assessments and reassessments, can translate to real dollars in the form of lawyer fees or lost income while the unit sits vacant. At the same time, the $500-per-violation fine creates a potential money pit for property owners who might unwittingly run afoul of the new regulations.

4. Artificial Intelligence Ready Schools Act

When it comes to AI, Maryland policies and governance are crafted to "first do no harm." For lawmakers, that inevitably translates to more regulation.

The Artificial Intelligence Ready Schools Act creates statewide AI guidance and governance structures for K-12 schools. This includes a requirement that the Maryland State Department of Education provide "local school systems, educators, parents, and students" with guidance on which AI tools are acceptable for use, and a rubric for scoring AI tools used by educators.

The bill creates a slew of new administrative burdens for schools, including designating AI coordinators, new reporting requirements, guidance systems, training programs, and procurement structures—adding to the administrative layer cake that already devours Maryland's school funding.

5. Maryland Artificial Intelligence Partnership

Maryland's push to regulate AI includes establishing an Artificial Intelligence Partnership with the state's university system. While the bill aims to support AI innovation and integration in the state's public institutions, it does so by creating a new regulatory office complete with a director, partnership hubs, subcabinets, fellowships, annual reports, and planning structures.

Prioritizing government-backed innovation hubs over a decentralized approach where the market rewards entrepreneurship is another way for lawmakers to steer resources, such as capital and labor, toward favored projects. Mandating that technology development aligns with the government's way of thinking is a surefire way to slow innovation in a rapidly growing industry like AI.

Maryland's road to growth starts with deregulation. Unfortunately, the state will continue to take one step forward and two steps back until lawmakers curb their appetite to feed the administrative state.

The post 5 Bills Signed by Wes Moore That Will Impact Housing and AI Development in Maryland appeared first on Reason.com.

A Flawed Minimum Wage Study Shows How Bad Stats Get Turned Into Policy Gospel

2026-05-27T15:25:33Z

The minimum wage is on the rise in the U.S. Thirty states, the District of Columbia, and at least 68 localities have set hourly compensation above the federal floor of $7.25. New York City, Long Island, and Westchester are at $17. In California, fast-food establishments are required to pay their workers $20 per hour.

Advocates for these laws point to academic studies that claim higher minimum wages don't cost jobs. Many of them use statistical techniques that generate misleading results or are misinterpreted by the media. A 2024 paper published in The Review of Economic Studies titled "Minimum Wage Employment Effects and Labor Market Concentration" didn't get as much press attention as some studies in this canon, but the paper is still worth examining because its statistical missteps are typical of academic research published in prestige journals.

Co-authored by five economists, the paper found that minimum wage increases haven't led to job losses at big-box stores, concluding that these "monopsonistic" establishments therefore must systematically underpay their workers. The University of Pennsylvania, where one of the co-authors works, promoted the study in an article titled, "Increasing minimum wage has positive effects on employment."

The authors reached their conclusion by dividing American counties into those with retail sectors dominated by a few large employers (call these "the Big-Box counties") and those with more diverse retail employers ("the Mom-and-Pop counties"). Next, they looked at how employment of store clerks, order fillers, retail salespeople, and cashiers in the general merchandise sector responded to minimum wage increases relative to overall county employment.

They found that in Big-Box counties, a 10 percent higher minimum wage was associated with 1.12 percentage points lower job losses among store clerks than among county workers overall. In Mom-and-Pop counties, the same wage increase was associated with 1.79 percent larger job losses among store clerks than among overall county workers. In other words, the relative loss of low-level retail jobs was smaller in the Big-Box counties than in the Mom-and-Pops.

The authors presented this finding as evidence that workers were being underpaid in areas that experienced smaller job losses. Big-Box employers have "more wage-setting power" and thus must "tend to pay workers less," as the University of Pennsylvania summarized it. The Washington Center for Equitable Growth cited this paper in an essay arguing for expanded antitrust enforcement and higher minimum wages. The study also appeared (in its preprint form) in a roundup by Noah Smith of recent scholarship demonstrating how economists have become "unlikely crusaders" against monopolistic power.

The study took a bizarre logical leap. A reasonable interpretation of why Big-Box counties experienced lower unemployment after a minimum wage increase is that store clerks at companies like Walmart already earn more than clerks at Mom-and-Pop establishments, so a minimum wage increase is less likely to artificially boost their earnings above the marginal revenue product of their labor. The study also didn't prove that minimum wage increases cause employment increases, as the University of Pennsylvania claimed; it only showed that average county workers get laid off at higher rates than Walmart clerks.

There's another problem with this paper that's common in academic research: its overreliance on "p-value," which indicates the statistical significance of its findings. A p-value is not enough to tell us whether a finding is the result of pure chance. For that, we also need to know two more p's—prior probability and the power of the test. This study, like many, leaves out the two extra p's.

To illustrate what I mean, consider going to a baseball game and seeing one player get four hits in four at-bats. That's a good day for the player, but four-for-four games happen about twice a week during the Major League Baseball (MLB) season. Nevertheless, our single observation could support a paper claiming that the player is the best hitter in baseball history, "significant at the 5 percent level."

What exactly does "significant at the 5 percent level" mean? Let's say that to be the best hitter in baseball, the player has to at least match Tetelo Vargas' batting average of 0.471 in 1943. The chance of a 0.471 hitter going four-for-four is 4.92 percent. Since that's less than 5 percent, we say we reject the null hypothesis that the hitter we just saw had a batting average of 0.471 or lower at the 5 percent level. So we can publish the claim that we just saw the best hitter in baseball history. But remember, going four-for-four happens about twice a week in MLB, and every player who achieves this feat has a lower batting average than Vargas.

The problem is that we over-relied on the p-value and ignored prior probability and power. There have been about 25,000 hitters in MLB history. If we test all of them at the 5 percent level, we expect 1,250 of them to be falsely identified as the best hitter in the history of baseball. That's why prior probability matters.

Meanwhile, if we did happen to catch Tetelo Vargas during the 1943 season, he went four-for-four in only one of 30 games. That makes this a low-power test; we catch only one out of 30 true results. So we get 1,250 false results and one-thirtieth of a true one.

Back to the minimum wage paper. Its p-value is around 2 percent, which is below the required 5 percent threshold for publication, supporting the claim that a 10 percent higher minimum wage is associated with 1.12 percentage points lower job losses among store clerks than among overall workers in Big-Box counties.

The authors committed the same fallacy as claiming that a player is the best hitter in history based on going four-for-four in one game. The test is too low-powered. There are only three counties in the U.S. with county-wide minimum wage regulations higher than state and federal rules: Howard County, Prince George's County, and Montgomery County, all in Maryland. All are Big-Box counties. Their minimums range from $15.30 to $17.65. There's not much ability to notice a 1.12 percent difference in job losses from that sample.

I'm simplifying the analysis; the authors do make use of less direct comparisons. But given all the noise and complexities, it seems unlikely a 1.12 percent difference would stand out. I think I'm being generous in saying there's 20 percent power to their test

Let's say we run this test on 1,000 similar hypotheses. The hypothesis that minimum wage increases affect average county workers more than Walmart clerks has a low prior probability. So let's say 5 percent (50) of the 1,000 are true. At our assumed 20 percent power, we flag 10 to publish as claims. Of the 1,000 hypotheses, 950 are false, and at a 2 percent p-value, 19 of them pass statistical muster. So, it's 10 out of 29, or a 34 percent chance, that this claim is true. No reasonable combination of prior and power assumptions makes the study's result more likely true than false.

Researchers do not report priors and power because they are not required to. Journals don't require priors and power because there is no consensus on how to estimate them, and because requiring them would force authors to make a much weaker claim than "statistically significant at the 5 percent level." Press offices love p-values because the word significant sounds scientific. Journalists rarely look past the press release. Activists and politicians cite the resulting headlines as if they were settled facts. Each link in the chain has a small incentive to keep the misunderstanding going, and almost nobody has an incentive to break it.

I picked on the minimum wage paper because it's an unusually clean example of overemphasizing p-values, but this practice is a common distortion in academic studies.

The argument against minimum wage increases must be made on its own terms. I'm taking aim at this trick of taking a marginal academic finding, stripping out its uncertainty, and restating it as a sweeping policy claim.

The same trick is run on every spending program, every regulation, every tax, and every policy of any constituency that wants to dress something up as a scientific finding. A study reports a 1.12 percent effect with a 2 percent p-value, and, somewhere downstream of the press release, a politician quotes it as proof that a favored policy is the wise course of action. The reader who has learned to ask for the prior and the power is, structurally, a much harder reader to fool. Run the arithmetic on the next study you see cited as an established fact, with whatever priors you find honest. Most of the time, the implied probability that the claimed result is correct will land somewhere between a quarter and a half.

The federal minimum wage has not moved since 2009. The state laboratories of democracy have, in the meantime, run an enormous natural experiment on the question of what happens when you raise it. But the science has been badly weaponized for a policy fight, exploiting a popular view that a p-value below 5 percent is enough to draw a meaningful conclusion.

This article is excerpted from the book Wrong Number: How to Extract Truth From a Blizzard of Quantitative Disinformation by permission of Wiley. The book is based on Aaron Brown's video series of the same title with Reason.

The post A Flawed Minimum Wage Study Shows How Bad Stats Get Turned Into Policy Gospel appeared first on Reason.com.

Anti-Tech Extremism Worries the Same Federal Government That's Been Fueling Anti-Tech Extremism

2026-05-27T15:41:35Z

Anti-tech extremists are beginning to worry federal law enforcement authorities. Wired obtained "more than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers" that detail plans to keep an eye on this new category of supposed domestic threat.

It's hard to know where to begin here. Maybe with that meme about the Leopard Eating People's Faces Party?

For years, the federal government and politicians from both parties have been stoking broad and hysterical anti-tech sentiment. They have hauled tech CEOs before Congress and blamed them for everything from sex trafficking to teenage suicide, politically motivated violence, Donald Trump winning or not winning elections, and much more.

The government may not have single-handedly created anti-tech extremism, but it's been a prime kindler of it. In an attempt to gain more control over online speech and online activities, authorities have spent the past decade fueling an anti-tech wildfire. Now they're concerned?

Well, maybe. As Wired points out, there could be something more going on here.

By portraying protesters and political activists as extremists, federal authorities gain cover to conduct surveillance and investigations. We've seen this countless times before, from the monitoring of socialist groups, civil rights advocates, antiwar protesters, and others considered subversive in the last century to more recent antics involving Black Lives Matter activists or government-critical groups on both the left and the right.

Illogical and sometimes illiberal anti-tech sentiment certainly abounds—and deserves criticism. But putting the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security on the case could endanger free speech and people who are merely exercising their First Amendment rights. It could be used to justify monitoring protester group chats, sending federal agents to surveil peaceful protests, and more.

A March report from the Northern Virginia Regional Intelligence Center showed "monitoring of constitutionally protected events and demonstrations related to critical views on technology," notes Wired. "These events included multiple 'Tesla Takedown' protests … and a 'Break Up With Tech Rager' sponsored by Eject Elbit, an activist group organizing to halt investment in the Israeli weapon's manufacturer Elbit."

And intelligence analysts hired by the federal government "appear to be scouring the web for what they claim to be anti-technology sentiment as well," notes Wired.

Meanwhile, a report from the New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau warns that "the chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City."

With all the animosity toward AI—and misinformation about data centers—out there, it's not absurd to worry that some of this could lead to vandalism or violence. But on some level, the call is coming from inside the house. So, maybe instead of creating broad and vague new categories of people to label "extremists" in need of surveillance, the FBI should talk to U.S. and state leaders about halting their own extreme anti-tech rhetoric and regulation.

In the News

"Plan B for STIs" is effective against syphilis and chlamydia. DoxyPEP, an antibiotic that can prevent sexually transmitted infections (STIs) if taken within 72 hours after unprotected sex, is doing the job well when it comes to syphilis and chlamydia but not when it comes to gonorrhea, according to a new study published in The Lancet: Infectious Diseases. DoxyPEP "cut the risk of getting syphilis or chlamydia by up to 60%," reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

But it had no effect against gonorrhea, and there are signs that doxyPEP may be contributing to drug resistance in the bacteria.

The overall results are promising for a new class of therapy that is seen as a potentially important tool against rising rates of sexually transmitted infections, public health experts said. The study results around gonorrhea were disappointing but not surprising, they said. Drug resistance in gonorrhea has been an increasing problem for decades, and though doxyPEP may have sped up the process, that doesn't mean people should stop using it. In fact, San Francisco this month updated its guidelines for use and now recommends it for some high-risk cisgender women.

In 2022, San Francisco developed guidelines for doxyPEP use for men who have sex with men and transgender women. "Within a year of offering doxyPEP widely, rates of syphilis and chlamydia were down about 50% in those groups," notes the Chronicle. " There was no change in gonorrhea."

Read This Thread

1/ At 17 weeks pregnant, Emily Waldorf was suddenly faced with a life-threatening situation: Her baby's foot was dipping out of her cervix.

Doctors told her the longer her cervix stayed open, the higher her risk of infection.

They knew how to treat her. There was one issue… pic.twitter.com/Dnw9uJrwoD

— ProPublica (@propublica) May 27, 2026

More Sex & Tech News

• North Carolina House Bill 1232 would not only define personhood as beginning at fertilization—making anyone who performs or gets an abortion guilty of first-degree murder—but also justify "the use of deadly force" to protect fertilized eggs.

• The American Institute for Boys and Men aims to do research on porn that isn't politically or ideologically biased. "Researchers for the institute say there is little longitudinal research that has been done on the subject, and that much of the existing research has been funded by religious institutions and other groups that are opposed to pornography for moral reasons," notes the Deseret News.

• Will Linux be exempted from California age-verification requirements? "An amendment to California's AB 1856 would change the definition of an 'operating system provider' to exclude open-source software from California's age verification law, mirroring a similar exemption in Colorado," notes The Verge.

• Massage businesses continue to be subjected to serious police raids for occupational licensing violations. (Police, of course, say they're looking for sex trafficking.)

The post Anti-Tech Extremism Worries the Same Federal Government That's Been Fueling Anti-Tech Extremism appeared first on Reason.com.

How Moral Panic Creates Black Markets

2026-05-26T20:35:51Z

Today's guest is Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth, the author of Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.

He talks with Nick Gillespie about why some voluntary transactions provoke moral outrage even when no one is being directly harmed. Roth explains why black markets often emerge when governments try to ban activities with persistent demand, why both markets and prohibitions require social support to function, and how unintended consequences can make moralistic policies backfire. They discuss the war on drugs, prostitution, surrogacy, same-sex marriage, price gouging, and why Iran remains the only country in the world with a legal market for kidney donors.

They also explore Roth's work designing kidney exchange networks and school choice systems, how digital technology and private transactions make certain bans harder to enforce, and why harm reduction may work better than prohibition in areas ranging from drug policy to sex work.

0:00—Repugnant transactions and organ sales

9:30—Blood plasma, coercion, and class bias

16:46—School choice reform

22:59—Same-sex marriage, abortion, and contraception

29:59—The war on drugs and moral economics

38:55—Roth's theoretical origin story

43:45—Uber, AI, and technological efficiencies

51:26—Price gouging and consumer resentment

54:27—Pornography, prostitution, and privacy

1:05:21—Has America become more economically moral?

1:12:15—Biden's economic agenda and Trump's tariffs

1:17:04—Winning a Nobel Prize

Producer: Paul Alexander

Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

The post How Moral Panic Creates Black Markets appeared first on Reason.com.

Illinois Plans Tax Break for Billionaires and the Chicago Bears. Everyone Else Could End Up Paying More.

2026-05-27T16:28:15Z

The Illinois Legislature is busy advancing a bill that's one of the most egregious examples yet of the grift between professional sports teams and state and local governments.

Under House Bill 910, projects designated as "megaprojects" would have their assessed value frozen at a base-year level, effectively shielding all new construction from property taxation for up to 45 years. Just two developments would qualify for the maximum duration under the current language: the proposed Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights and the One Central mixed-use development near Soldier Field in Chicago.

Rank-and-file property owners in Illinois pay the highest property taxes in the nation, but middle-class taxpayers get no relief under the bill. Instead, it's likely their taxes will go up even more. The language says "megaproject" developers (for projects that cost at least $100 million) would be able to negotiate a payment in lieu of taxes with local taxing bodies, with the duration of the tax break varying by the total cost of the development. For example, if a property tax analysis of the Arlington Heights stadium estimates it to be a $5 billion development on land currently valued at $100 million, this bill would reduce the developer's annual tax liability from roughly $350 million to approximately $7 million.

What happens to the difference of $343 million in this example? Local governments can still count the full value of the megaproject when calculating how much they're allowed to tax and borrow—they just can't actually collect taxes on most of the megaproject. Given the record of local governments in Illinois, it's a pretty good bet they'll find that revenue elsewhere by raising taxes. The legislation, as it stands, does basically nothing to address this.

The bill passed the Illinois House in April. The bill passed 78–32, with 10 Republicans crossing party lines to support it. Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker is busy pressuring the state Senate to get it across the finish line before the end of May. Pritzker (and the rest of the Legislature) are feeling pressure to pass the bill due to the looming threat of the Bears moving to northwest Indiana. Hoosier lawmakers, especially Republicans, have a standing offer for the Bears to relocate just across the state line for over $1 billion in public subsidies. (At least Indiana is in better fiscal health than Illinois.)

Keeping the Bears in Illinois is not Pritzker's only interest in the bill, though. He and his family, the wealthy owners of the Hyatt hotel chain, stand to gain from similar property tax schemes for billionaires. (Pritzker and his wife once had five toilets removed from a vacant mansion they owned next door to their primary residence, with the goal of having the property classified as "uninhabitable" in a property tax appeal. The mansion's assessed value was thus lowered from $6.3 million to about $1.1 million.) Hyatt operates a state-owned, tax-exempt property, Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, that just received tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded renovations, approved by a board partially appointed by Pritzker.

Grifting off taxpayers via property tax schemes is a practice that goes way back for Pritzker, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that he's seeking to extend these property tax breaks to other billionaires. If he gets his way, Illinois residents will be stuck paying for these sweetheart deals while billionaires get a break.

The post Illinois Plans Tax Break for Billionaires and the Chicago Bears. Everyone Else Could End Up Paying More. appeared first on Reason.com.

Free Speech and Respect for Student Autonomy

2026-05-27T00:30:25Z

In my book, in defense of considerably more constitutional protection for student speech, I make an autonomy-enhancing argument, relying not only on the importance of respect for student autonomy on the part of school authorities, implying that in almost all circumstances, students should be able to say what they want to say and how they want to say it, without fear of being punished. I also underscore the extent to which the exercise of free speech rights over time can help students develop their autonomous capacities, as speakers, listeners, and thinkers. That is not to say that other free speech arguments are bad. I just happen to think that an autonomy-enhancing one, coupled with the inability of school officials to censor competently or impartially, is particularly well-suited for the context of secondary education.

Although I'm not a libertarian, I am very libertarian about some things, including free speech. I might be even more of a free speech absolutist than Professor Volokh is (if that is logically possible, ha ha). I detest paternalism, that is, justifications for restrictions on free speech that maintain that not being allowed to speak or be exposed to the ideas of others is for the good of the speaker or the listener. I would prefer to live in a society where normally, lawmakers do not tell people what to do, as if they are wiser or know a person better than that person knows him/herself. I find it arrogant for anyone to assume that they know what is better for me than I do and to think they should be able to use political power to coerce me for my own well-being.

For similar reasons, paternalistic defenses of censorship of student speech do not work. Respect for the autonomy of each student on the part of school authorities requires a very strong presumption in favor of letting students express themselves, even when they express false, offensive, or stupid ideas. By "autonomy," I mean the right to make personal choices about the most important aspects of one's life and to be responsible for the consequences. People are supposed to be persuaded, not manipulated, threatened, or coerced, and that includes giving them access to the information and ideas that enable them to exercise their autonomous capacities. That way, each agent can evaluate, as carefully as possible, the considerations for and against life decisions, especially the most important ones concerning which ends to pursue, how to pursue them, and when (or whether) to revise them.

Simply put, censorship at a public school is incompatible with respect for the autonomy of each student. As a generalization, at my undergraduate institution, I have found Gen Z students to not be independent or resilient. In fact, they do not seem to like trying to figure out things for themselves. Instead, they would rather ask me what to do. I find this trend to be problematic for multiple reasons. When you treat teenage students as children in junior high or high school, including policing their speech, they will act like children. Nobody learns how to become more independent and responsible by being told what to do. Besides, a student speaker is not likely to harm herself by speaking or writing. Nor are those in the intended audience likely to be harmed by exposure to her speech. A "verbal" assault is just a metaphor. Indeed, the opposite is more likely to be true: students will benefit from self-expression and that of others when they are exposed to a variety of ideas, regardless of whether they agree. Restrictions on speech stunt intellectual growth, self-reflection, and the acquisition of knowledge, thereby undermining the development of the autonomous capacities that help to make us who we are.

Paternalism as a justification for censorship at a junior high or high school would be more plausible if very few teenagers were capable of educationally benefiting from the experience of exchanging reasons with their classmates in the public discourse at the school. Even when the average teenager cannot express herself as effectively or thoughtfully as an adult, that is beside the point. The bar should be low, when the goal is gradual improvement, as she learns to form her own ideas and share them with others on campus. One does not deny someone the chance to develop an important skill in life because she lacks it at the outset. As William Glod remarks, "Paternalism frustrates a person's self-development and is thus wrong for that reason."^[1] All teenagers can participate in the marketplace of ideas as their school in one way or another if they choose to do so. After all, there is no such threshold for adults in other circumstances or for undergraduates at a public university. Everyone is allowed to participate in public discourse, regardless of their motivations, intelligence, thoughtfulness, and knowledge.

One can concede an obvious point to critics of more constitutional protection for student speech --that many teenagers are immature and will try out ridiculous ideas—without also accepting the much less defensible conclusion that all students are so immature that none of them should be able to engage in free speech. Whereas we might not want to let a thirteen-year-old vote (or let her parents vote for her), the implication is not that she also should not be able to express herself at her junior high school if she wants to write an editorial in the school newspaper or criticize the principal or a teacher on social media. Between early and late adolescence, students' ability to think improves. Thus, one can surmise that their future selves, when they are older, have a very important interest in being able to think more independently.

Although the exercise of autonomy does not always produce good consequences, including happiness, satisfaction of desires, improved welfare, or emotional well-being, it is still intrinsically valuable insofar as the person who is exercising her autonomous capacities is doing what a human being is meant to do, inasmuch as she conceives of herself as a free and equal being, by using her rational capacities, making decisions, and acting accordingly. My reasons may be hard for you to understand or may turn out to be bad reasons by an objective standard (if there is one when it comes to life decisions not involving facts) yet they are still my reasons. As such, the government should not be vetting them.

Even young children have partial autonomy. Poor choices do not necessarily mean that a teenager lacks such capacities, no more than they do when adults make bad decisions, which is not uncommon. Even when a thirteen-year-old does not have a right to vote, she still should be able to exercise her constitutional right of free speech, grounded in respect for autonomy. In terms of cognitive abilities, by 14/15 at the latest, teenagers are indistinguishable from adults. Like adults, children have degrees of autonomy, and some of them are not only more autonomous than their classmates but are more autonomous than many adults are. Just as it would not make sense to treat a four-year-old as if she were eighteen, it also would make no sense to treat an eighteen-year-old like a four-year-old. Everyone falls somewhere on a continuum provided that they have autonomous capacities. While it may make little sense to assert that preschoolers should have free speech rights, older and more cognitively sophisticated students fall into a different category for free speech purposes. Enough of them can assess the plausibility of claims, compare alternatives, and even call into question a teacher's competence or motivations. In my junior high and high school, I still can recall a fair number of decisions by school officials that did not make sense to me then and still do not make sense to me now, forty years later. Usually, older students find themselves on a different part of the learning curve.

If the exercise of autonomy and the development of autonomous capacities had little to do with speech, communication, and thinking, the constitutional protection of student speech would be less imperative. But that is not the case. From the standpoint of autonomy, it should be assumed that as both speakers/writers and listeners, students should be able to express themselves. People cannot be nearly as autonomous as they could be when they cannot openly communicate with others. As a result, students must have ample opportunity to develop confidence in their own voices, and that requires continual practice. A school, which is an educational institution after all, is an ideal place for students to begin exercising their free speech rights before they become adults.

[1] William Glod, Why It's Okay to Make Bad Choices (Routledge, 2021), 14.

The post Free Speech and Respect for Student Autonomy appeared first on Reason.com.

Escalation in Iran

2026-05-27T13:28:17Z

Back in business: Tensions appear to be mounting again between the U.S. and Iran.

Yesterday, Iran accused the U.S. of a "grave violation" after our military launched new strikes on missile sites and boats that were trying to place mines in southern Iran. U.S. Central Command characterized these actions as "self-defense"—merely an effort "to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces" but Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) disagreed: They fired at several U.S. drones and a fighter jet that entered their airspace.

The two countries had been on the verge of an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

"The U.S. military's Central Command said in an update Tuesday that the ongoing U.S. blockade of Iranian ports and vessels linked with the regime had turned around a total of 108 ships since it was implemented on April 13," reports CBS News. The blockade—implemented by President Donald Trump a few days after a very loose ceasefire was hammered out, due to the mid-April talks in Pakistan failing to produce an agreement with which he could be happy—has repeatedly been referred to by Iran as a violation of that agreement; the Strait of Hormuz, and whether ships are allowed passage through the major shipping corridor, has been a consistent point of disagreement and tension. (Central Command has clarified that U.S. forces "will not impede freedom of navigation for vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from non-Iranian ports.")

The strait is, of course, where about one-fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas passes through, so the blockades have resulted in soaring prices (and intense unpredictability) globally. Watch also for other weird supply chain disruptions and the knock-on effects they might have. Will disruptions in, say, fertilizer shipping affect crop yields? Reason readers don't need too much reminding on this front, but, you guys, war is bad on a lot of dimensions.

Key questions remain about what a durable peace deal would look like, including whether Iran would be allowed to maintain a nuclear program in any form. Trump also appears to be using the Abraham Accords—trying to get Qatar and Saudi Arabia to sign on, which would normalize ties with Israel—to get the Iran hawks within his administration to feel like they already have a win under their belt, to allow for more flexibility elsewhere.

Scenes from New York: "The mayor announced a new plan Tuesday to help rescue some of the most distressed rent-stabilized landlords. Eligible apartment owners will be able to charge a one-time rent increase on certain empty units, even if a rent freeze is enacted later this year," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The percentage increases would be determined on a case-by-case basis but could amount to hundreds of dollars a month in some cases." He's a classic communist: Handpicking winners and losers. ("The roughly 300,000 apartments financed through the city's housing agencies are potentially eligible for the rent increase once they are empty, along with other assistance," reports the Journal. It's government entanglement in real estate all the way down.)

QUICK HITS

"The Trump administration is moving to create a government-wide nondisclosure agreement for federal workers after a number of high-profile and unauthorized leaks in recent months," reports Bloomberg. "The proposal specifically mentions leaks related to the American military raid in Venezuela in January and planned enforcement actions by immigration agents in the US.…The draft says violators are subject to disciplinary action 'up to and including removal and debarment from future Federal employment or contractor status, and civil and criminal penalties.'" It's not clear how (or whether) this will actually be enforced, exactly.
"Under federal law, states must administer annual standardized tests in math and reading in grades three through eight. But several states have recently lowered the score a child needs to be deemed 'proficient,' producing big gains on paper without any change in the classroom," reports The New York Times. "Wisconsin redesigned its assessment, and English proficiency in the state increased to 48 percent from 39 percent. Illinois and Kansas have followed suit. In more than half of the states, proficiency rates on state reading tests now exceed the rates on national tests by 15 percentage points or more, and in some states the gap is much larger."
SpaceX moves in the IPO direction.
LOL:

at long last, our nation's enemies have stolen the most dangerous technology in America's arsenal: the California Environmental Quality Act https://t.co/E8wOsvuhYD

— Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma) May 26, 2026

A good read from Selim Koru at Reason: "Ayn Rand Is Alive in Ankara"
The French return to tradition:

France bans Zyns and other nicotine pouches - with violators facing 5 years in prison and a shocking fine https://t.co/eG49CMesKD pic.twitter.com/dw1GpdsihQ

— New York Post (@nypost) May 24, 2026

The post Escalation in Iran appeared first on Reason.com.

Today in Supreme Court History: May 27, 1935

2025-07-12T04:54:49Z

5/27/1935: Schechter Poultry Corp. v. U.S. decided.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: May 27, 1935 appeared first on Reason.com.

High Liquor Taxes and a Home Distillation Ban Guarantee a Thriving Booze Black Market

2026-05-26T20:58:16Z

In January, police in Alabama arrested a Florida man (yeah, that guy) for allegedly transporting 81 gallons of moonshine. He certainly isn't the only player in that business. Bootlegging has a long and storied history in the United States. In a country that has a love/hate/really love relationship with alcoholic beverages, innovative entrepreneurs seeking to evade high taxes on distilled spirits illegally manufacture the stuff for sale, and the authorities justify a ban on home distillation in the name of collecting those taxes. People also smuggle from low-tax to high-tax states. The result is a game of cat-and-mouse that gave us legendary figures. It even inspired customized smuggling vehicles that inspired NASCAR racing.

A Federal Ban Driven by Perverse Tax Reasoning

"Federal law strictly prohibits individuals from producing distilled spirits at home," according to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (yes, this is separate from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, because why wouldn't there be multiple federal agencies with overlapping jurisdiction?). "Producing distilled spirits at any place other than a TTB-qualified distilled spirits plant can expose you to Federal charges for serious offenses and lead to consequences including, but not necessarily limited to…up to 5 years in prison, a fine of up to $10,000, or both, for each offense."

TTB is part of the Department of the Treasury and primarily tasked with filling federal coffers. But the colorful and high-stakes game between bootleggers and tax collectors really stifles the flow of money that government officials use to justify restrictive laws. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled in McNutt v. U.S. Department of Justice in April, the federal government bases the home-distillation ban on its taxing power, but the legal provisions imposing prohibition with stiff penalties "exceed these constitutional limits. Primarily, neither provision raises revenue. Not only do they prohibit at-home distilleries, but in so doing, they amount to an antirevenue provision that prevents distilled spirits from coming into existence….The provisions operate to reduce revenue instead of raising it."

To be clear, there would be good reasons to distill and sell moonshine even if home distillation were legal. The taxes mentioned above are insanely high. Outright federal prohibition and sky-high state excise taxes arrive at the same destination from different directions; both encourage illegal activity.

An Illegal Industry Inspired by Strict Laws and High Taxes

"Generally, distilled spirits suffer the stiffest tax rates of all alcoholic beverages," Jacob Macumber-Rosin and Adam Hoffer reported last week for the Tax Foundation. Beer and wine are taxed, but at lower rates than distilled spirits relative to alcohol content. Also, 17 state governments in "control" states impose a government monopoly on liquor sales, which lets them hike prices beyond those that would be set in a competitive market. Unsurprisingly, control states also tend to have higher excise taxes than states with competitive markets, although Wyoming and New Hampshire are exceptions where government revenues depend on liquor sales rather than high taxes.

Tax rates vary widely among states. Washington has the highest excise tax at $36.68 per gallon, followed by Oregon at $23.74 per gallon. Wyoming and New Hampshire, where state officials profit from their monopoly, impose effective excise tax rates of zero. Missouri charges $2.00 per gallon.

Excise taxes aren't the end of state impositions, though. Various governments impose case and bottle fees, sales taxes specific to liquor, wholesale taxes, and license fees for retailers and distributors. High taxes create incentives to illegally manufacture alcohol for sale at prices that beat the legal stuff. Significant differences between state levies also push people to purchase booze in low-tax states and illegally resell it in high-tax states, paralleling the thriving black market in tobacco.

"Just as with cigarettes, significant differentials in tax burdens between nearby jurisdictions incentivize cross-border trade and smuggling," add Macumber-Rosin and Hoffer. "For instance, residents of Washington, the state with the highest spirits taxes, are estimated to account for 8 percent of purchases in Idaho, a neighboring control state with a lower effective tax burden (though still the 9th highest in the country). That 8 percent of purchases amounts to approximately $25.3 million in sales."

That's before we even talk about the federal excise tax. "The first 100,000 proof gallons of distilled spirits manufactured in America per calendar year are taxed at a reduced rate of $2.70 per proof gallon, which would be $1.08 per gallon of 40 percent ABV [alcohol by volume] spirits," note Macumber-Rosin and Hoffer. "The next 22.13 million proof gallons manufactured in America per calendar year are taxed at $13.34 per proof gallon ($5.34 per gallon of 40 percent ABV spirits). Any additional spirits manufactured in America and all spirits imported into the country are taxed at the general rate of $13.50 per proof gallon ($5.40 per gallon of 40 percent ABV spirits)."

Taxes Are Half the Price of a Bottle of Booze

Added all together, taxes make up about half the price of a typical bottle of liquor. "When you factor in federal, state and local taxes, more than 52% of the price of a typical bottle of spirits goes toward a tax of some kind," according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, an industry trade group.

No wonder bootlegging plays such a large cultural role in the U.S., with cars modified for the purpose decades after Prohibition was repealed. And no wonder Alabama cops are still pulling over vehicles full of moonshine. The opportunity to make a buck by illegally manufacturing moonshine, or by smuggling legally produced liquor from a low-tax to a high-tax jurisdiction for resale, is guaranteed to tempt many people.

For the same reason, home distillation has the potential to really take off as a hobby if the Fifth Circuit Court's reasoning prevails when the issue arrives before the U.S. Supreme Court. If, on the other hand, the Sixth Circuit's contrary conclusion that "the home-distilling ban was lawful when enacted, and remains so today" in Ream v. U.S. Department of the Treasury wins in the high court, home distillation won't receive the boost of legality, though it will continue the growth in popularity it has enjoyed in recent years. Reason's Jacob Sullum recently addressed the tension between the decisions.

Ultimately, though, federal and state officials have created the perfect conditions to encourage an illegal market in distilled spirits. Between the ban on home distillation, which dates to 1868, and high federal and state liquor taxes, they've extended an invitation to anybody with an adventurous streak to manufacture their own booze, and to sell it to others to make a buck.

You don't have to be from Florida to see the attraction of trying out your own liquor recipes or filling a car with whiskey in one state and driving it to another. Americans have been doing that for decades, and as long as high taxes make it lucrative, they will continue to do so—no matter which way the courts decide.

The post High Liquor Taxes and a Home Distillation Ban Guarantee a Thriving Booze Black Market appeared first on Reason.com.

Brickbat: Help Yourself

2026-05-27T03:39:32Z

Selene Varela pleaded guilty to theft concerning a program receiving federal funds and faces up to 10 years in federal prison for stealing money meant to help homeless people during the COVID-19 pandemic. While working in the Community Development Department in Amarillo, Texas, Varela created fake landlords, tenants, and housing applications so she could steal $41,350 in federal housing aid, even paying her own rent for six months with housing vouchers. Authorities said she cashed the fraudulent payments through relatives while working remotely during the pandemic. Two other former city employees also pleaded guilty in related cases: Varela's supervisor, Amy Dixon, admitted to embezzling about $465,000 from the homeless assistance program and was sentenced to two years in federal prison, while grant manager Vanessa Robinson pleaded guilty to conspiracy to embezzle over $121,000 from the same program and will serve 18 months.

The post Brickbat: Help Yourself appeared first on Reason.com.

Open Thread

2026-05-27T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

The Unusual Denial in Reinink v. Hart

2026-05-27T06:27:18Z

Reinink v. Hart presented an excessive force claim under the Fourth Amendment. The case was rescheduled three times and relisted after eight conferences. On May 26, the Court finally denied certiorari. But there was an unusual notation:

Petition DENIED. Justice Thomas and Justice Alito would grant the petition and summarily reverse for essentially the reasons given in Judge Larsen's separate opinion. See Hart v. Grand Rapids, 138 F. 4th 409, 426–428 (CA6 2025).

It is not uncommon for a Justice to dissent from the denial of certiorari, and maintain they would have summarily reversed the lower court. I found eleven such cases since 2012. But in each such case, the dissenting Justice authored an opinion explaining why he or she would have SumRev'd.

But here, Justices Thomas and Alito jointly voted to summarily reverse the lower court opinion without writing separately. And they did so "for essentially the reasons given" by Judge Larsen's separate opinion. Larsen's opinion, which concurs in part and dissents in part stretches about three pages.

I suppose this dissent is a compliment. The Justices didn't even feel compelled to write separately. They just adopted a lower court judge's opinion. But the word "essentially" is a hedge. They apparently disagree with something, but do not tell us what.

What happened here? Thomas and Alito kept the case alive for five months, hoping to find another two votes for cert, but were unable to do so. They could have written a dissental, but it is the end of the term, and more important work is on the docket, so they just let Judge Larsen speak for them.

The post The Unusual Denial in Reinink v. Hart appeared first on Reason.com.

250 Years Later, Benjamin Franklin's Warning Is Still Relevant

2026-05-26T22:02:24Z

This summer, the United States celebrates its 250th birthday.

In 1776, few people believed this new version of self-government would last.

After the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government the Founding Fathers had created.

"A republic," he replied, "if you can keep it."

If.

It's rare that a new form of government lasts dozens of years, let alone 250.

How did America do it?

In my new video, people give reasons:

"In the U.S. Constitution, you see a lot of phrases like 'Congress shall not' or 'No law shall be passed,'" Rob Henderson, the author of Troubled who coined the term "luxury beliefs," points out. "It's not about what government will do for you. It's focused on [how] Congress and the government are not going to interfere in your lives."

That made America different, says economist Donald Boudreaux: "Compared to most other governments throughout history, ours has been the freest and the most liberal in the sense of tolerating differences in people and accepting economic change."

Daniel Di Martino, who escaped Venezuela to come here, says: "We're all immigrants fleeing from something—dictatorships, tyranny, socialism. The descendants of those people were willing to take more risks, and also willing to defend their liberties."

That made Americans different from Europeans.

"By necessity, Americans were very independent," says Linnea Lueken of the Heartland Institute. "We went out into untamed wilderness and established towns that didn't have to lean on a central government to function properly."

Without nobility controlling property, ordinary people could own land, start a business, and keep the profits.

"America is more devoted to property rights than any other country, and that is why America is more free," argues Ryan McMaken of the Mises Institute.

Property rights and limits on government allowed Americans to try the new things that made America prosperous.

The Founders didn't want a government that took care of people. They wanted a government that mostly left us alone.

They created "three branches of government designed specifically to check each other," says author Wilfred Reilly. "Because so many mistakes are made by leaders."

"Leaders" do make mistakes, constantly.

Yet today, we keep increasing their power. There is that instinct to say, "Problem? Government should fix that. There ought to be a law!"

But the more laws governments pass, the more power politicians have and the less autonomy individuals have. The Washington swamp keeps growing, under both Democrats and Republicans, most of whom ignore the limits our smart Founders put into our Constitution.

It's good that there are free market think tanks that push back.

I like the Cato Institute's mission: "Keep the principles, ideas, and moral case for liberty alive."

Cato President Peter Goettler recently wrote, "The forces of liberalism unleashed in the Founding era ultimately brought the curtain down on slavery and have persistently extended rights, liberty, and the American dream."

But he also points out today's threats to that dream: "Towering debt we continue to accrue…masked government agents disappearing people without due process; targeting of political enemies…tariffs fluctuating at the president's whim…enmeshing of government with private enterprise…foreign adventurism absent congressional involvement or national debate."

Sigh. All true.

The Constitution says only Congress can declare war, but presidents from both parties now grab power that the Founders never intended for them to have.

Harry Truman intervened in Korea without a formal declaration of war. Likewise, John F. Kennedy expanded U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Richard Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia. George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama. Bill Clinton engaged in military operations in Bosnia and Yugoslavia. President Donald Trump launched military actions in Iran. All without congressional approval.

"That's not what America was about," says McMaken. "America was focused on rights and protecting them."

"The first nation in history founded on the inalienable rights of the individual," adds the Atlas Society's Jennifer Grossman. "It recognized that man is not a sacrificial animal for the collective, the king or the majority."

"That alone makes us rich," agrees Boudreaux. "That alone makes us more likely to survive another 250 years."

For 10 generations, the American republic has prospered.

Benjamin Franklin's question is still relevant: Can we keep it?

The post 250 Years Later, Benjamin Franklin's Warning Is Still Relevant appeared first on Reason.com.

Even Republicans Are Rebelling at Trump's Blatantly Corrupt 'Anti-Weaponization Fund'

2026-05-26T13:58:13Z

Last week, Republican senators grilled Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche about the $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" created by President Donald Trump's settlement of his lawsuit against the IRS. About 45 senators attended the meeting, and "at least half of them were blasting the attorney general," Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) reported. "They were pissed."

It is not hard to see why. The lawsuit that provided the pretext for using taxpayer money to compensate purported victims of "lawfare and weaponization" was legally dubious, the fund has nothing to do with Trump's claims against the IRS, and the main beneficiaries are apt to be the president's allies and supporters.

The lawsuit pitted Trump against agencies he oversees, represented by government lawyers who are forbidden, under an executive order that Trump issued in February 2025, to "advance an interpretation of the law" that "contravenes" the president's position. That bizarre situation prompted the federal judge overseeing the case to question whether it involved a genuine controversy between adverse parties, as required for the lawsuit to proceed.

The lawsuit was provoked by IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn's illegal leaking of Trump's tax returns. But Trump filed his complaint too late: more than two years after Littlejohn pleaded guilty to what Trump's personal attorney accurately called "an egregious breach."

According to Trump's May 18 settlement agreement with the IRS, Littlejohn's leaks, which included confidential information about thousands of wealthy Americans, epitomized Democrats' use of government power to "target individuals, groups, and entities for improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons." Although that is a counterintuitive way to describe the conduct of a rogue contractor who was prosecuted by the Biden administration, it is the only attempt to justify the Anti-Weaponization Fund as a logical result of Trump's litigation.

It is highly unusual for the Justice Department to settle a lawsuit by agreeing to pay people whose grievances are completely unrelated to the plaintiff's claims, which in this case involved the IRS's allegedly lax oversight of its contractors. Such settlements, in fact, are prohibited by a rule that the Justice Department issued during Trump's first term.

That rule, which Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, reaffirmed in February 2025, generally prohibits settlement payments to "a non-governmental person or entity that is not a party to the dispute." There are a few limited exceptions, none of which seem to apply in this case.

Trump's settlement agreement arbitrarily assigns $1.776 billion to the Anti-Weaponization Fund—a reference to the nation's founding year that it preposterously claims is "based on the projected valuation of future claimants' claims." The five members of the board charged with doling out that money will be appointed by the attorney general and can be removed by the president "without cause" at any time.

Although the Justice Department says "there are no partisan requirements to file a claim," it seems clear the process will favor Trump's friends. The board, the composition of which is completely subject to Trump's control, will "cease processing claims" a month and a half before he leaves office, and the settlement agreement describes "lawfare and weaponization" as abuses peculiar to Democrats.

"I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE!" Trump explained on Friday. Those "others" presumably include the 1,600 or so Trump supporters who were arrested (and later pardoned by Trump) for participating in the 2021 Capitol riot.

The prospect that the fund "could potentially compensate someone who assaulted a police officer" is "absurd," Sen. Thom Tillis (R–N.C.) remarked last week. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) likewise said "a slush fund to pay people who assault cops" was "utterly stupid" and "morally wrong."

"I'm supposed to work out a settlement with myself," Trump acknowledged a few days after suing the IRS. The upshot of his admitted self-dealing is an arrangement so brazenly corrupt that even Republicans are having trouble accepting it.

The post Even Republicans Are Rebelling at Trump's Blatantly Corrupt 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' appeared first on Reason.com.

Does Anyone Know What's Happening in Iran?

2026-05-26T22:33:00Z

This week, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch are joined by The Gist's Mike Pesca to discuss the ongoing Iran conflict, the unstable ceasefire negotiations, and whether anyone in Washington has a coherent explanation for what the United States is trying to accomplish. The panel examines President Donald Trump's shifting rationale for the war, the growing pressure for regime change, and why so many of the same foreign policy debates from the Iraq era seem to be repeating themselves in real time. They also consider whether America's political class has learned anything from the past two decades of interventionism.

Next, the panel turns to Spencer Pratt's surprisingly competitive Los Angeles mayoral campaign and what his rise says about frustration with the city's political establishment. They discuss why media coverage of Pratt increasingly resembles the early anti-Trump backlash, whether one-party political cultures are capable of meaningful reform, and why even critics of Pratt's candidacy acknowledge that Los Angeles governance appears badly broken. The editors then revisit the panic surrounding Project 2025 and ask how much of the agenda actually materialized during Trump's second term. Finally, the panel examines Trump's controversial $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" and why even some Republicans see it as an unprecedented abuse of executive power.

0:00—What have we learned from this war with Iran?

9:38—Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo clashes with the Trump administration

14:19—Spencer Pratt and the Los Angeles mayoral race

27:11—Listener question on Project 2025

37:28—The Anti-Weaponization Fund

47:29—Weekly cultural recommendations

Mentioned in the podcast:

"Yes, the Iran War Is a 'War of Choice,' and a Bad One," by Nick Gillespie

"Why Does Trump Keep Bringing Up Decades-Old Foreign Grievances?" by Matthew Petti

"Drew Carey Goes on Foul-mouthed Rant About Spencer Pratt's LA Mayoral Run: 'F–k This Guy,'" by Antoinette Bueno

"The $1.776 Billion in Trump's 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' Fits a Pattern of Fanciful Figures," by Jacob Sullum

"Trump's 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' Is Built on a Contradiction," by Billy Binion

"The DOJ's Flimsy Legal Theories To Support Trump's 'Anti-Weaponization Fund,'" by Joe Lancaster

The post Does Anyone Know What's Happening in Iran? appeared first on Reason.com.

France Is Banning Zyn and Threatening To Jail People for 5 Years

2026-05-26T21:51:08Z

If you're planning on packing Zyn for your European summer vacation, you might want to reconsider.

On Sunday, the New York Post reported that France had banned "a number of popular nicotine-based products including Zyn pouches." Those caught violating the measure could face up to five years in prison and a fine of $436,600.

While other European countries have moved against nicotine pouches, France is the only Western country to criminalize their use.

"It's as if we would prohibit French baguettes or French wine in Sweden," Swedish Trade Minister Benjamin Dousa told the Financial Times. He also called the ban on these pouches, which originated in Sweden, an "attack on the Swedish way of living."

In addition to inciting rage from other countries, the ban could face legal headwinds under Europe's single market rules, which guarantee the free movement of most goods among the E.U.'s member states. Under the new French regulations, which went into effect on April 1, a Swede could legally buy pouches at home, visit France, and face prison time and an enormous fine.

As the Financial Times reports, Sweden, Italy, Greece, and four other countries have raised "formal concerns" that the French ban violates the E.U.'s single market laws. Five Swedish members of the European Parliament have even threatened to stop going to the French city of Strasbourg—which hosts the European Parliament's monthly meetings—arguing that the ban has "direct consequences for the free movement of persons" because they risk sanctions for traveling to France.

The French health ministry has classified nicotine as a "toxic substance" and justified the ban as necessary to curb rising dependency on the chemical compound. But in doing so, the government risks trading in reliance on one substance for dependency on a far more dangerous one.

Nicotine pouches are far less harmful than cigarettes. As the U.S. Food and Drug Administration points out, "for adults who smoke, switching completely from cigarettes to nicotine pouches may reduce exposure to many harmful chemicals found in cigarettes." A randomized controlled study published in 2023 measured 20 biomarkers of exposure and found that people who completely switched from cigarettes to nicotine pouches had dramatically lower exposure to harmful chemicals within just one week. Reductions were approximately 42 percent to 96 percent compared to the group smoking cigarettes, which was at a similar level to those who quit using tobacco products entirely. The researchers concluded that "the substantial reduction in harmful and potentially harmful constituent exposure" suggests that switching from cigarettes to nicotine pouches "may present a harm reduction opportunity for adults who smoke."

Not only are nicotine pouches far safer than cigarettes, but they are also an effective cessation device. In a cross-sectional study, 62.9 percent of nicotine pouch users reported quitting smoking entirely. An ongoing study of people living in the Appalachian region in the United States, where the prevalence of cigarette smoking exceeds 30 percent in many of these rural counties, expects to find that oral nicotine pouches increase the likelihood of quitting smoking.

The ban on these alternatives will likely have an outsized impact in France, where tobacco remains the leading cause of preventable deaths, and was responsible for 68,000 premature deaths (11 percent of total mortality) in 2023. And with 55 percent of daily French smokers saying they wanted to quit the habit in 2024, a lack of access to nicotine pouches will keep many people addicted to cigarettes.

Meanwhile, Sweden, which has the lowest smoking rate in Europe, has achieved remarkable success for public health, predominantly thanks to oral nicotine products. Since the 1980s, it has seen its smoking rate fall from 30 percent to less than 5 percent.

Banning a safer and healthier method of nicotine consumption, especially in France, where smoking rates are so high, is counterproductive and harmful to public health. This is, yet again, another example of a European government needlessly dictating what people can and cannot do. In this case, the harms could not be more obvious.

The post France Is Banning Zyn and Threatening To Jail People for 5 Years appeared first on Reason.com.

A Reprieve for Build-To-Rent

2026-05-26T21:34:03Z

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to the latest edition of Rent Free. This week's slightly abbreviated post-Memorial Day issue includes a breakdown of the latest version of the housing bill passed by the House last week.

We also have an item on how, contra some recent headlines, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is not offering any major exceptions to his coming rent freeze.

House Housing Bill Protects Build-To-Rent

A bipartisan housing supply bill that has been in the works since the summer of last year passed the House last week, minus a controversial requirement that large investors sell off their holdings of build-to-rent single-family homes to individual owner-occupiers.

The latest House version of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which passed 396–13 on Wednesday, still bans large investors from purchasing existing single-family homes.

But these investors would no longer be required to sell off their holdings of purpose-built single-family rental communities, which the Senate's version of the bill would have forced them to do.

Housing supply advocates, who are generally supportive of the ROAD to Housing Act's grab bag of policies aimed at increasing home construction, have praised the removal of the forced dispossession requirement for build-to-rent housing.

"Just by removing that dispossession requirement changes the bill from something that has some positives for housing supply and one big negative into something that is unambiguously good for housing supply," says Will Poff-Webster, a housing policy expert at the Institute for Progress.

Build-to-rent single-family communities are often owned by large investors, built on a single, legal parcel of land around shared amenities, and intended as a long-term "hold" investment. In recent years, build-to-rent housing has accounted for as much as 10 percent of new single-family home construction.

Requiring owners of these communities to break them up and sell them off to individual owners thus presented a huge list of legal and practical difficulties. The mere passage of the Senate's bill with the build-to-rent restrictions included reportedly already caused some investors to pull out of build-to-rent projects.

On the glass-half-empty side, the bill still does include a ban on investors owning more than 350 single-family homes. This restriction is predicated on the popular bipartisan notion that large corporations are frequently outbidding individual families for existing single-family homes.

This never made much sense. Large investors have always owned a tiny share of single-family homes. The number of individual homes owned by large investors has also been falling for over a decade.

Cracking down on large investors now likely won't lower prices, but will marginally reduce the number of available single-family rentals.

"The House bill still strongly favors wealthier homebuyers over less-wealthy renters [and] feeds off myths about investors," writes rental housing economist Jay Parsons.

The Popular Politics of an Investor Crackdown

Politically, it likely would have been very difficult to pass the ROAD to Housing Act without some restrictions on corporate single-family home ownership.

President Donald Trump has actively pushed for these restrictions for much of his second term. The White House urged the House to pass the Senate's version of the ROAD to Housing Act, even with the build-to-rent restrictions.

Its statement on the House's version also singles out the remaining large investor restrictions for praise.

Trump admin blesses House version of housing bill pic.twitter.com/sMfnbMYzc4

— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) May 20, 2026

"Given this is the president's top priority in housing, I think something was going to happen on this. And the House version is way better than the Senate version," says Poff-Webster.

The president has found ready allies among progressive Democrats in his war on large single-family housing investors.

As Politico reported over the weekend, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) was a major advocate for the build-to-rent restrictions in the Senate version of the housing bill and is not happy about their exclusion in the House's version.

She said in a joint statement with Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.) that there is "still work to be done" on the House bill.

The House bill also includes some deregulation of community banks that are a priority for House Committee on Financial Services Chairman French Hill (R–Ark.), but which Warren opposes.

This adds more friction to a bill that has received wide bipartisan support whenever it's been brought up for a floor vote. The House has now passed its own version of the bill twice with nearly 400 yes votes. The Senate passed its version of the bill with 89 ayes.

But the waxing and waning investor restrictions in the bill continue to imperil the final passage of this generally popular bipartisan collection of little fixes to federal housing policy.

The Forgotten Housing Supply Fixes in the Bill

For all the fireworks over the investor restrictions, the gist of Congress' housing bill has remained largely the same since the first version of it was introduced last summer in the Senate's Banking Committee by Scott and Warren.

From day one, its purpose has been to shift federal policy in a more pro-growth direction without creating massive new programs or spending a lot more money.

The latest House version of the bill continues to do that.

It would remove a number of federal building code restrictions on manufactured housing, including a cost-increasing rule that manufactured homes must sit on a permanent steel chassis.

The bill also retains a provision, authored by Warren, that creates an "innovation fund" that would give grants to localities that liberalize their zoning codes to allow more types of housing in more places and/or streamline housing approvals.

Environmental reviews of federally funded housing projects would be streamlined.

The House's legislation also includes an idea first sponsored by Sen. John Fetterman (D–Penn.) that would have the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) publish model zoning code reforms.

The House bill does notably axe the Build Now Act, authored by Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.), which was originally intended to redistribute some Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds from communities that build little new housing to communities that build a lot.

The Senate's housing bill had included the Build Now Act, albeit a flawed version of the original idea, says Salim Furth of George Mason University's Mercatus Center.

"The Build Now Act was premised on the idea that cities should receive more federal funding if they build more homes," he says in an email. "The text of the Build Now Act [in the Senate bill] made a number of klutzy errors. The most egregious of those was that it distributed bonus funding on the basis of how many homes exist in a city, not how many homes are built."

In effect, it would have made CDBG a subsidy program for the biggest cities, regardless of whether they were increasing their housing stock or not.

To be sure, neither the House nor the Senate bill attempts to reduce Washington's role in housing policy. For that reason, even early versions of the bill that did not include restrictions on large investors attracted criticism from small government proponents.

Still other free marketers argue that if the federal government is going to influence housing markets through an array of grant programs and regulations, it might as well use its influence to encourage more home construction and less local and state regulation.

The remaining investor restrictions aside, the latest House version of the bill largely does that.

Mamdani's Housing Plan Includes Little Real Relief From His Rent Freeze

Earlier today, The Wall Street Journal reported that some New York City landlords would be exempted from Mayor Zohran Mamdani's proposed rent freeze. According to the Journal's reporting, landlords who had received financing from city departments would be allowed significant one-time rent increases on their empty units.

New York's limits on the ability of landlords to raise rents on vacant units have been a major sore spot for landlords, who complain that they're unable to finance needed repairs when a unit turns over or charge something approaching market rents on new tenants.

A recent lawsuit filed by property owners against the city alleges that the rent caps on vacant units are unconstitutional.

The Journal article caused a stir in part because Mamdani has continued to stick to his campaign trail promise to freeze rents on rent-stabilized units. The city's Rent Guidelines Board is in the process of giving the mayor his wish.

On closer inspection, however, there's less to the Journal story than meets the eye. Mamdani himself stressed at a press conference today that any one-time increases on vacant units would be done through existing programs and not through some new initiative.

Most vacant units would not qualify for these rent increases, says Michael Gareth Johnson, vice president for communications and research at the New York Apartment Association. Rent increases would be granted on a case-by-case basis and likely mostly to non-profit-owned units, he says.

So, in short, the mayor has not offered any significant new systemic lifeline to property owners being driven into bankruptcy by New York's rent caps.

The post A Reprieve for Build-To-Rent appeared first on Reason.com.

Defamation Claim Against University-Owned Public Radio Station Dismissed on State Sovereign Immunity Grounds

2026-05-26T21:21:22Z

From Eby v. Bd. of Curators, decided today by the Missouri Court of Appeals (Chief Judge John P. Torbitzky, joined by Judges Angela Turner Quigless and Thomas C. Clark II); the opinion doesn't preclude a defamation lawsuit against the actual authors of the articles, though presumably they don't have much money to compensate the plaintiff even if he prevails:

St. Louis Public Radio ("KWMU") is owned and operated by the University. KWMU hired Eby in 2009. He eventually became KWMU's general manager. In September 2020, KWMU removed Eby as general manager after he was accused of racism.

In the wake of his termination, Eby filed a defamation action alleging the University repeated and/or republished defamatory statements. Eby alleged an anonymous group of KWMU's staffers published an article on Medium.com accusing him of upholding "white supremacy at the station by remaining complacent with the status quo." KWMU published two online articles that quoted and hyperlinked the Medium.com article's accusations. Eby also alleged KWMU falsely reported that he mismanaged KWMU's finances.

Finally, Eby alleged that sovereign immunity did not apply to this suit because KWMU performed a propriety function for the University …. The University filed a motion to dismiss or for summary judgment asserting that Eby's claims were barred by sovereign immunity….

"Sovereign immunity is a common law judicial doctrine barring suit against a government or public entity." Unless sovereign immunity is waived, abrogated, or consented to, sovereign immunity applies to the state and its entities.

Eby's assertion that the circuit court must first determine whether the state entity's actions are governmental or proprietary in all cases is incorrect. "The traditional rule … permits the application of the governmental-proprietary distinction (and the preclusion of immunity in the latter circumstance) only as to municipalities." A municipality has immunity for its governmental functions but not for proprietary functions. "Proprietary functions 'are those performed by the municipality for profit or for the special benefit of the municipality.'" "Full common law sovereign immunity belongs only to state entities."

Eby admitted the University is a state entity, existing pursuant to article IX, section 9(a) and (b) of the Missouri Constitution, and section 172.200. The University is an acknowledged "public entity with the status of a governmental body." As a result, the circuit court correctly declined to apply the governmental-proprietary analysis to the University.

Because the University is a state entity, it is entitled to sovereign immunity. There is no need to invoke the governmental-proprietary function analysis….

It appears that under Missouri law, sovereign immunity may be waived "when a public entity maintains liability insurance without a sovereign immunity exception," but the trial court concluded that the university's insurance policies did have such an exception, and the appellate court upheld that decision.

The post Defamation Claim Against University-Owned Public Radio Station Dismissed on State Sovereign Immunity Grounds appeared first on Reason.com.

Why Has Trump Stopped Selling Weapons to Taiwan?

2026-05-26T20:28:32Z

Before he became the Trump administration's chief military planner, Elbridge Colby had a single-minded mission: to muster the resources of the United States in defense of Taiwan. "Taiwan would not be the end of Beijing's ambitions. So the question is, how do we deter China from attacking Taiwan and not just in some distant future, but as early as the coming years?" he said in a 2023 debate, arguing that U.S. commitments in other parts of the world (such as Ukraine and the Middle East) were a dangerous waste of military resources.

More than a year into Donald Trump's second presidency, it's safe to say that the administration is doing the opposite of what Colby recommended. In a congressional hearing last week, acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao said that the U.S. is "doing a pause" on weapons sales to Taiwan "in order to make sure we have the munitions we need for Epic Fury," the name of the U.S. operation against Iran.

Trump himself gave another reason for the pause on the way back from last week's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Weapons sales to Taiwan are "a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly," Trump told Fox News in Beijing. "I'm not looking for somebody to go independent, and we're supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war. I'm not looking for that. I want [Taiwan] to cool down. I want China to cool down." At that meeting, Xi warned Trump that conflict over Taiwan could go to "an extremely dangerous place."

It's a quiet but massive shift in U.S. policy. Both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration considered competition with China to be the United States' most serious challenge. Now the U.S. government is trying to freeze that conflict—on terms slightly favorable to China, as far as Taiwan is concerned—in order to focus on small wars in the Middle East and Latin America.

Taiwan is currently awaiting Trump's approval on a $14 billion weapons deal approved by Congress last year. (There is also a $29.72 billion backlog in weapons that Taiwan bought but the U.S. never delivered.) The proposed deal, whose contents were not publicly disclosed, "largely consists" of air defense ammunition, Reuters reports. The U.S. military rapidly burned through its air defense magazines during the war with Iran, firing more missile interceptors in defense of Israel than the Israeli military itself did.

"We firmly oppose the United States engaging in any form of military ties with China's Taiwan region," Chinese government spokeswoman Zhang Han declared before the Trump-Xi meeting.

The conflict between Taiwan and mainland China began with the 1947 revolution. While the communist People's Republic of China swept the mainland, remnants of the old Republic of China reassembled on the island of Taiwan. The U.S. government recognized the Taiwanese republic as the only legitimate government of China until the 1970s, when Washington normalized relations with Beijing, recognized the People's Republic, and dropped its support for the Republic of China.

Taiwan itself transitioned to democracy in the 1990s, and has had a hearty domestic debate on what exactly the island is now. Some Taiwanese administrations considered themselves the heirs to the Republic of China that should reunify with the mainland government. Others, including the current administration of President Lai Ching-te, have argued that Taiwan is a separate nation from China. Beijing has tried to quash this debate by force, passing a law in 2005 threatening an invasion if Taiwan moves towards full independence. Xi declared last New Year's Eve that unification is "unstoppable" while overseeing major military exercises.

Meanwhile, Congress requires the U.S. government to continue providing "the governing authorities in Taiwan" with weapons to counter "any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means." Unlike other U.S. presidents, Trump has spoken directly to Taiwanese leaders, implicitly recognizing that Taiwan is independent. It's a fragile peace in which each side maintains its claims without pressing them too hard. But the costs of war may leave Washington unable to back up its own stance.

The post Why Has Trump Stopped Selling Weapons to Taiwan? appeared first on Reason.com.

American Can't Sue Iraq and Lebanon for Allegedly Anti-Gay Policies

2026-05-26T20:17:39Z

From Alshara v. Republic of Iraq, decided today by Judge Linda Parker (E.D. Mich.):

Pursuant to § 1915(e)(2), the Court is required to sua sponte dismiss a complaint filed [in forma pauperis, i.e., as an indigent litigant who can't afford a filing fee -EV] before service on a defendant if it determines that the action is frivolous or malicious, fails to state a claim upon which relief can be granted, or seeks monetary relief against a defendant who is immune from such relief….

In the Complaint, Plaintiff states that he is seeking to hold Iraq and Lebanon liable for their anti-LGBTQ+ policies, legislation, and systematic state-sponsored persecution. Plaintiff claims that these policies and laws "have been exported to the United States through their nationals" and "have directly caused catastrophic harm to Plaintiff, a gay United States citizen residing in Wayne County, Michigan." Plaintiff's family members, who are nationals and persons of Iraqi and Lebanese origin, have allegedly subjected Plaintiff to physical harm and threats of harm and death—behavior Plaintiff claims is "motivated exclusively by anti-gay animus rooted in the official state ideologies and legal frameworks of Iraq and Lebanon." Plaintiff indicates that he has modeled this lawsuit on the jurisdictional and substantive framework established in Doe v. Deutsche Lufthansa (9th Cir. 2025).

In that case, however, the Ninth Circuit considered only whether there was personal jurisdiction over the defendant-airline in California and whether there was federal subject matter jurisdiction based on diversity jurisdiction. The court did not discuss whether the plaintiffs stated a viable cause of action against the defendant-airline. Moreover, the plaintiffs there were not suing a foreign country based on its laws and policies; instead, they were suing the defendant-airline for its own alleged misconduct.

It is well settled "that the subject-matter jurisdiction of the lower federal courts is determined by Congress 'in the exact degrees and character which to Congress may seem proper for the public good.'" The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act is the "sole basis for obtaining jurisdiction over a foreign state in our courts." Section 1604 of the statute provides that "[s]ubject to existing international agreements to which the United States [was] a party at the time of the enactment of this Act[,] a foreign state shall be immune from the jurisdiction of the courts of the United States and of the States except as provided in sections 1605 to 1607 of this chapter." Plaintiff's allegations do not suggest an exception immunity under the FSIA.

The acts of Iraq and Lebanon, of which Plaintiff complains, are officials acts and policies of those foreign governments. The Act of States Doctrine precludes United States courts from inquiring into the validity of the public acts of a recognized foreign sovereign power committed within its own territory. The doctrine "provides that a federal court 'will not adjudicate a politically sensitive dispute which would require the court to judge the legality of the sovereign act of a foreign state.'" "It is built around separation of powers concerns relating to foreign affairs and reflects 'the strong sense of the Judicial Branch that its engagement in the task of passing on the validity of foreign acts of state may hinder the conduct of foreign affairs.'"

While the FSIA has an exception "for personal injury or death … occurring in the United States," such injury must be "caused by the tortious act or omission of that foreign state or of any official or employee of that foreign state while acting within the scope of his office or employment …." As one district court has explained, "§ 1605(a)(5) is essentially a respondeat superior statute, providing an employer with liability for certain tortious acts of its employees." State law governs whether the respondeat superior doctrine applies.

In Michigan, the doctrine imposes liability on an employer generally for the torts of its employees committed within the scope of their employment. The Michigan Supreme Court "has defined 'within the scope of employment' to mean 'engaged in the service of his master, or while about his master's business.'" Here, Plaintiff's factual allegations do not suggest that any individual who has threatened to harm or has harmed him is an employee, official, or an agent of Iraq or Lebanon.

In short, the exceptions in the FSIA do not apply and, therefore, there is no basis for obtaining jurisdiction over these foreign nations. Plaintiff's claims are also barred by the Act of State doctrine. Absent an act or omission in the United States, caused by an employee, official, or agent of Iraq or Lebanon, the United States courts are precluded from inquiring into the validity of Iraq's and Lebanon's official state policies and legislation….

The post American Can't Sue Iraq and Lebanon for Allegedly Anti-Gay Policies appeared first on Reason.com.

First Amendment Likely Precludes Trump Administration's Canceling DEI-Promoting Contracts, Ninth Circuit Rules

2026-05-26T19:58:13Z

There's a lot happening in today's decision in Thakur v. Trump, by Ninth Circuit Judges Richard Paez, Morgan Christen, and Roopali Desai, but I thought I'd focus on the First Amendment analysis. To oversimplify, the Trump Administration canceled a wide range of academic grants "because of the recipients' perceived expression of DEI, DEIA [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility], or environmental justice viewpoints." The grant recipients sued, arguing that such viewpoint-based cancellations are unconstitutional.

The law related to viewpoint-based conditions attached to government subsidies is complicated. On one hand, as the Court noted in Rust v. Sullivan (1991), "When Congress established a National Endowment for Democracy to encourage other countries to adopt democratic principles, it was not constitutionally required to fund a program to encourage competing lines of political philosophy such as communism and fascism." Likewise, the government can fund a program for promoting military enlistment, or recycling, or racial equality, without having to give grants for contrary views.

On the other hand, as the Court noted in cases such as Rosenberger v. Rector (1995), the government can't set up a generally available funding program and then exclude recipients based on viewpoint. For instance, it can't exclude religious newspapers from a funding program for student newspapers at the University of Virginia, or excluding anti-government or racist or pro-Israel groups from the 501(c)(3) charitable tax deduction program.

Where should the line be drawn? Here's what Thakur says:

[T]here is a critical distinction between creating or ceasing a particular program (or subsidy, or forum), on one hand, and discriminating against disfavored speaker viewpoints within a program (or subsidy, or forum), on the other. The government may impose restrictions on subsidies "to define the limits and purposes of [that] program." But it cannot "leverage its power to award subsidies … into a penalty on disfavored viewpoints." Indeed, the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed "the requirement of viewpoint neutrality in the Government's provision of financial benefits." Rosenberger.

And here's a short excerpt from the panel's long elaboration of the matter:

The First Amendment prohibits the government from using its power "to punish or suppress disfavored expression." … Because "viewpoint discrimination is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society," the government "must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale." …

The government "can, without violating the Constitution, selectively fund a program to encourage certain activities it believes to be in the public interest" at the exclusion of other activities. Thus, the government has discretion to define subsidy programs in a way that reflects its preference to fund (or not fund) particular activities. See, e.g., Rust (1991) (rejecting challenge to regulations that permitted Health and Human Services to award grants to entities so long as no funds were used for abortion services).

{The Supreme Court has also recognized "that viewpoint-based funding decisions can be sustained in instances in which the government is itself the speaker." Where the government "appropriates public funds to promote a particular policy" using private speakers, "it is entitled to say what it wishes." Here, the government has not argued that the grant programs at issue use "private speakers to transmit specific information pertaining to its own program," nor that the grant programs enable the government "to promote its own policies or to advance a particular idea."}

"[E]ven in the provision of subsidies," however, "the Government may not" engage in viewpoint discrimination by "aim[ing] at the suppression of dangerous ideas." "[I]deologically driven attempts to suppress a particular point of view are presumptively unconstitutional in funding, as in other contexts." The Supreme Court has explained that where the government establishes a subsidy program, it may not discriminate between speakers within that program to suppress viewpoints with which it disagrees. See Rosenberger (noting that where a state university offers funds to student organizations "who convey their own messages," it "may not silence the expression of selected viewpoints" by denying funding to a religious student organization because of its religious viewpoint)….

Thus, [in NEA v. Finley (1998),] the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the NEA reauthorization statute "[u]nless" it was "applied in a manner that raises concern about the suppression of disfavored viewpoints." "If the NEA were to leverage its power to award subsidies on the basis of subjective criteria into a penalty on disfavored viewpoints," the Court cautioned, it "would confront a different case" because "even in the provision of subsidies, the Government may not aim at the suppression of dangerous ideas." …

The government [in this case] erroneously characterizes each individual grant as a "program" that it may choose to fund or not fund. See Rust (noting that Congress may "selectively fund a program"). But the agencies selected particular grants for termination regardless of the programs through which they were funded, and the record shows the agencies made the decisions to terminate based only on the recipients' perceived expression of DEI, DEIA, or environmental justice viewpoints. Because the agencies' termination of grants is aimed at the suppression of viewpoints with which the government disagrees, it likely violates the First Amendment. See Finley; Rosenberger…

[T]he important distinction between Finley and Rosenberger is not between competitive grants and generally available subsidies. Rather, the critical difference is between a facial challenge to a program that by its design excludes categories of activities or speakers (e.g., those that tend to violate general standards of decency and respect [as in Finley]), and an as-applied challenge to the government's decision to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint in a particular funding decision (e.g., as Plaintiffs allege here)….

[T]he government insists that its funding decisions are subject to a constitutional constraint only when the government "seek[s] to leverage funding to regulate speech outside the contours of the program itself." Supreme Court precedent defeats this argument….

To be sure, the government may violate unconstitutional-conditions principles when it imposes restrictions on speech outside the contours of a program, but the government offers no support for the assertion that this is the only constraint on the government's funding decisions. If that were so, it would be hard to reconcile with the Supreme Court's cautionary warning in Finley that "even in the provision of subsidies, the Government may not 'ai[m] at the suppression of dangerous ideas.'" The government's argument is also at odds with the Supreme Court's decision in Rosenberger, which "reaffirmed the requirement of viewpoint neutrality in the Government's provision of financial benefits." …

To give an analogy that goes the other ideological direction, say that the Trump Administration creates programs aimed at "advocating for traditional family values" or "advocating for the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state" or "advocating for the importance of fossil fuels." And say that a future Mamdani Administration decides to cancel those programs. It sounds like Thakur v. Trump would authorize such a cancellation, since this would involve "creating or ceasing a particular program (or subsidy, or forum)."

But say that instead the Mamdani Administration decides to cancel all grants that promote an earlier Administration's views of "traditional family values," or that are pro-Israel or pro-fossil-fuel—in whatever program they might have been made. (For instance, say that there's a grant program aimed at promoting crime reduction in which some of the grantees seek to reduce crime by promoting family values; a grant program aimed at promoting world peace in which some of the grantees seek to promote it by reaffirming the legitimacy of Israel; or a grant program aimed at promoting energy self-sufficiency in which some of the grantees seek to promote the goal by urging more fracking.) It sounds like Thakur v. Trump would forbid such a cancellation, since this would involve "discriminating against disfavored speaker viewpoints within a program (or subsidy, or forum), on the other."

Finally, note that the First Amendment logic related to the impropriety of certain viewpoint-based cancellations would also generally forbid similar viewpoint-based denials of initial funding. Rosenberger, after all, itself involved such initial funding decisions.

The post First Amendment Likely Precludes Trump Administration's Canceling DEI-Promoting Contracts, Ninth Circuit Rules appeared first on Reason.com.

The DOJ's Flimsy Legal Theories To Support Trump's 'Anti-Weaponization Fund'

2026-05-26T17:07:36Z

Last week, President Donald Trump settled his own spurious lawsuit against the government he controls by wresting $1.8 billion from the federal treasury to use for his own ends.

It seems clear the disbursement has no noncorrupt purpose, and the administration is relying on extremely weak legal arguments to make its case.

The case stemmed from a January 2026 lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS, seeking $10 billion in damages, after a disgruntled government contractor leaked his tax returns to the press.

"This claim is nonsensical and worthless," according to Cato Institute scholar David Post, who estimated "a reasonable valuation of this claim" was "$0.00."

Trump suddenly dismissed his own case last week, as the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it would provide $1.776 billion for the "Anti-Weaponization Fund," which would "provide a systematic process to hear and redress claims" by those "who suffered weaponization and lawfare" at the hands of the federal government.

"In reality, this is a massive taxpayer-funded slush fund that Trump will be able to distribute to his friends and allies—including those who rioted at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021," wrote Reason's Eric Boehm. "The Anti-Weaponization Fund is merely the most blatant example (so far) of Trump's corruption."

As if that weren't enough, according to a settlement agreement, the IRS would issue Trump a "formal apology," and it would be "FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing" him for any existing offenses—potentially saving the president from more than $100 million in fines for unpaid taxes.

The corruption is so blatant, even some Republican lawmakers have pushed back.

In fairness to Trump, an apology does seem warranted: As he noted in his lawsuit, "the IRS failed to establish safeguards to detect, let alone prevent, unauthorized access to confidential tax return information." Even after a rogue contractor pilfered hundreds of thousands of tax returns—including Trump's—and released them to the media, the DOJ did not learn the culprit's identity for three years.

In 2024, in fact, the IRS apologized to hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin "and the thousands of other Americans whose personal information was leaked to the press." While that total theoretically also included Trump, a more personalized apology shouldn't be out of the question.

But making restitution by cutting a check for any amount, much less nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money, is completely unwarranted. Just check out the weakness of the administration's arguments for why this isn't a completely unprecedented arrangement.

"Previous cases have been settled on similar terms," Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed in an order last week. He cited Keepseagle v. Vilsack, a class-action lawsuit filed in 1999 alleging that over the previous two decades, the U.S. Department of Agriculture discriminated against Native Americans when providing low-interest farm loans. The Obama administration settled the lawsuit in 2010, providing $680 million in direct compensation plus $80 million in loan forgiveness. But after all claims were processed, the fund still contained $380 million.

"In Keepseagle, hundreds of millions of dollars remaining in the fund were distributed to non-profits and NGOs that never made claims," the DOJ explained last week, "whereas any money remaining in The Anti-Weaponization Fund will revert to the federal government."

In 2018, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia approved a revision to the Keepseagle settlement. The new plan gave extra money to each of the original claimants, plus $38 million to nonprofits serving Native American farmers; the remaining $266 million provided the initial funding for the Native American Agriculture Fund, a private trust that provides grants to support "business assistance, agricultural education, technical support, and advocacy services for Native American farmers and ranchers."

At National Review, Dan McLaughlin agreed that the Anti-Weaponization Fund "looks a lot like a collusive operation to create a slush fund to pay off friends and political allies" using "nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money that Congress never appropriated." But in doing so, he added, Trump was "really just taking another page from the left's playbook." McLaughlin cited Keepseagle as well as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's 2014 settlement with the so-called Central Park Five, who spent between five and 13 years in prison for a rape they didn't commit, for $41 million.

But there is a major difference with what Trump is doing: In both those cases, a court approved the settlements. While de Blasio pledged to settle the Central Park Five case before he even took office, it wasn't official until a magistrate judge approved the payout.

And while the Keepseagle case was controversial—The New York Times wrote in 2013 of concerns about overly lax antifraud procedures—it, too, survived judicial scrutiny. Not only did Sullivan approve the updated agreement, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed it, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a challenge to it.

On the other hand, Trump dropped his lawsuit and drafted the settlement agreement just two days before the judge was set to hear arguments on whether the case should be allowed to proceed, likely because he knew the answer would be a resounding no.

"As a class action settlement, Keepseagle was subject to rigorous judicial oversight under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23. The district court was required to determine that the settlement was 'fair, reasonable, and adequate' to the class," Josh Gardner, a former DOJ attorney who served as lead counsel on the Keepseagle case, wrote on Substack. "In contrast, in Trump v. IRS, the parties settled the case without court approval and the claims administration process will not be subject to judicial oversight."

Besides, Trump's IRS settlement violates his own DOJ's stated policies. In his first term, the DOJ adopted a policy prohibiting settlements like Keepseagle with third-party beneficiaries.

"When the federal government settles a case against a corporate wrongdoer, any settlement funds should go first to the victims and then to the American people—not to bankroll third-party special interest groups or the political friends of whoever is in power," then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at the time. The government reaffirmed that policy most recently in February 2025.

Trump's first administration even defended the updated Keepseagle agreement before the Supreme Court by citing the new policy. It argued that the DOJ now "prohibits its attorneys from entering into settlement agreements in the future that require payments to persons or entities that are not parties to the dispute absent congressional appropriation."

One wonders how that squares with a settlement that explicitly leaves out the plaintiffs—Trump, his business, and two of his sons—but leaves open the door for an untold number of people who claim they were the victims of government weaponization—perhaps including "the political friends of whoever is in power."

The post The DOJ's Flimsy Legal Theories To Support Trump's 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' appeared first on Reason.com.

The Importance of Free Speech in American Public Junior High and High Schools

2026-05-26T17:08:54Z

When I was in college, liberals, not conservatives, were more zealous in defending free speech, when it came to issues like whether pornography ought to be constitutionally protected. In 1990, when I was in law school, and my first-year constitutional law class discussed Texas v. Johnson, the famous flag burning case, only the more conservative students thought that what Gregory Johnson did should not be constitutionally protected expressive conduct. At that time, a decade before I took Professor Volokh's free speech class when I was a graduate student in the political science department at UCLA, I hoped that someday, free speech would be a principle that would transcend partisanship. After all, it can be hard to predict what political party will control your school board, city council, state legislature, or Congress. If you give lawmakers the authority to censor an idea that you despise at one moment, whether you realize it, you also are giving them the authority to censor ideas that you find valuable in the future. No doubt, it can be very hard to stomach ideas that you find repulsive but inevitability, others will feel the same way about your ideas. In a society committed to free speech, the government must be neutral; it may not discriminate against viewpoints, including deeply offensive and even racist, sexist, and homophobic ones. No real human government will be able to censor "bad" viewpoints competently or fairly, even if we agreed which ones were bad most of the time. Equally importantly, the people who live in that society must be willing to allow others to speak their minds. The quality of their arguments ought to be beside the point.

These days in this country, it seems like a bad situation is becoming worse. On both the left and the right, of the American political spectrum, the natural tendency to censor disagreeable ideas seems increasingly more difficult to resist, including young adults. As someone who teaches at an undergraduate institution and has been doing so for more than twenty years, my impression is that college students are not nearly willing to countenance the expression of ideas, which they despise, as they used to be. Unlike concerns about censorship on college campuses, which have received a lot of media attention, when guest speakers are disinvited or shouted down, few people care much about the extent to which school authorities may suppress student speech in a public junior high or high school. The assumption is that due to their age and relative immaturity, most of what they contribute to the marketplace of ideas at their school will have little, if any, value. Furthermore, the primary mission of a school is to educate its students, and student speech can be disruptive or distracting.

As such, it may appear to be obvious that teenagers should not be able to exercise the same free speech rights that college students may exercise. However, position strikes me as harder to defend than most people acknowledge. After all, it is almost self-evident that if tweens and teenagers, who are impressionable, go to schools that are hostile to free speech, will absorb the wrong lessons, regardless of what they might read in their civics class. They can be punished for saying this, writing that, or wearing a tee short that expresses a view about abortion, guns, same-sex sex, or whatever, they could get detention, be suspended, or even expelled. Sooner rather than later, they will learn how to self-censor.

My new book, Democracy in Education: The Importance of Free Speech in American Public Schools, is about the importance of the free speech of junior high school and high school students in a country like our own; it calls into question the double standard as well, where public schools are treated so differently than colleges for free speech purposes. There are many ways to defend free speech, and my focus is on how educational the experience can be, when students not only are challenged to formulate their own views but are exposed to those of their classmates. Indeed, an important part of becoming a citizen in a democracy calls for learning how to deal with difference and disagreement in political life.

In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case, Mahanoy, involving this exact topic, the first time in fourteen years. In the famous Tinker decision (1969), the U.S. Supreme Court gave constitutional protection to student speech at public junior high and high schools for the first time in American history. In Mahanoy, the Court sided with a freshman who had been punished for what she said about the cheerleading coach and team. On Snapchat, on a weekend, B. L. posted a picture where she raised her middle finger with a caption that used the f-word multiple times, expressing her frustration about not making the varsity cheerleading team. In the eyes of school officials, such a crude gesture, coupled with crude language, was inappropriate. While Mahanoy did not receive extensive media coverage, for anyone who cares about free speech, it is a more important decision than most people realize, because it raises fundamental questions about the value of student speech and the place of censorship in a high school. If she had been a college student, the case would have been very easy: her speech would have been unequivocally constitutionally protected. Recently, scholars have had a lot to say about free speech on college campuses. However, few of them have had much to say so far about the free speech rights of junior high and high school students, which arguably may be even more important.

For now, school board members, administrators, and teachers have considerable discretion in such matters when they can make a plausible claim that the student speech in question is disruptive, sexual, offensive, school-sponsored, or advocates illegal activity. The implication is not only that they can discriminate against progressive viewpoints but against conservative or libertarian viewpoints as well. That should concern all of us in a society that is supposed to prepare teenagers for adulthood and democratic citizenship.

What I have to say in this book is less descriptive or explanatory and more normative. I spell out where the U.S. Supreme Court went wrong and what the law ought to be, as opposed to predicting what lower courts might do or what they are doing. Ultimately, my aim is to convince the reader that free speech doctrine must be revised so that such speech receives the kind of extensive constitutional protection that it deserves.

Initially, it may not be obvious why anyone would care about this topic if they are not interested in the details of free speech doctrine. For someone like that, I would maintain it is far too easy to underestimate the likelihood that student speech, more often than not, will help teenagers, at an age when they still are impressionable, become better democratic citizens by exposing them to political issues, giving them opportunities to have their voices heard, enabling them to appreciate the place of dissent in a democracy, encouraging them to listen to others, inculcating tolerance, teaching them how to exchange reasons with one another, and encouraging them to respond appropriately to disagreement -i.e.-- counter speech instead of censorship by a political authority. In this respect, the protection of this kind of student speech may be even more imperative than protecting the speech of adults, who already have formed their own views about the world.

I expound on why student speech ought to be afforded significantly more constitutional protection than it currently receives. Simply put, the value of student speech should not be underestimated, given the place of teenagers on the learning curve, and the state's countervailing interests in restricting it are weak upon closer examination. I go much farther than the U.S. Supreme Court has ever gone in ensuring that students can exercise their free speech rights when they are at school (and off-campus as well, when they are using social media) by proposing that public junior high and high schools be treated like public universities for purposes of freedom of expression (approximating California's Leonard Law, the only statute in the country that goes well beyond the constitution minimum. I formulate a much stricter version of the Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District substantial disruption test. The only reason why I do not adopt this extreme, and simply abandon the Tinker test, is that in my view, school officials ought to be able to restrict student speech in rare situations where it is likely to substantially disrupt the learning environment in the classroom, which would be equally true in at a public university. Content-neutral restrictions would be permissible in some places on school grounds yet they cannot serve as cover for school officials who want to avoid controversy. Ultimately, no public educational institution should be able to engage in any sort of viewpoint discrimination. As it turns out, junior high and high school students do not really differ from college students, who also are young and often immature, in terms of their being able to engage in freedom of expression and benefit educationally from the experience.

The post The Importance of Free Speech in American Public Junior High and High Schools appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump Policy Could Send Legal Residents Abroad To Apply for Green Cards

2026-05-26T16:12:15Z

As the Trump administration continues its deportation crackdown, it's finding new ways to make it harder for people to immigrate to the United States legally.

On Thursday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) published a policy memo requiring anyone seeking an adjustment of immigration status to do so "outside the United States," unless they qualify for "extraordinary circumstances."

This policy—which is effective immediately but lacks the force of law, as it's a guidance document—would be a sharp departure from the current process that allows those here on temporary status to apply for permanent residency without leaving the country. According to the memo, the shift in policy is an attempt to "faithfully apply the statutes" of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), specifically section 245, which governs the process for transitioning from temporary to permanent residence status.

There are 11.65 million cases pending with the USCIS as of September 2025, a 23 percent increase in its backlog since the previous fiscal year, according to the Niskanen Center.

The USCIS claims that its discretionary use of adjustment of status has been widened when it should have been narrowed. The agency states that the adjustment of status process was never intended to be used to "avoid the prescribed ordinary consular visa process."

Under section 245 of the INA, "an alien may submit an application for lawful permanent resident status, with fee, immediately after the granting of lawful temporary resident status." A plain reading of the text would appear to contradict the USCIS's claim that Congress "made it clear" that "aliens are expected to depart the United States when the purpose of their admission or parole has been accomplished."

The language in section 245 would ostensibly allow a person, after being granted temporary status and traveling to the U.S., to decide to file for permanent status while in the country. The USCIS states that Congress wrote a "detailed statutory scheme" designed to limit adjustment of status to "extraordinary" cases, but this likewise runs counter to the eligibility requirements.

The law actually states that anyone "lawfully admitted for temporary resident status" may apply for adjustment of status. Included in the criteria is a stipulation that the person "need not be" in the country, but they must "establish continuous residence in the United States." If, as the USCIS claims, Congress intended to narrow the use of adjustment status rather than the regular consular visa-issuing process, they would likely have omitted the language regarding residency.

It's more likely Congress included the stipulation that applicants "need not be" in the country to avoid excluding applicants already in another country applying for permanent residency, and to avoid requiring those in the U.S. to be expelled as a prerequisite for application.

Atlanta-based immigration attorney Charles Kuck says the policy "makes no sense" and that the discretion granted to the USCIS to set rules is "not absolute." In his view, Congress has already indicated that it favors an expansive view of the statute by continually adding exceptions to the categories of individuals eligible for adjustment of status.

Past exemptions have included skilled workers whose visas have lapsed, allowing them to adjust their status domestically. Congress has not given exemptions to people who entered the U.S. as crew members aboard ships or aircraft, anyone who has violated their visa status, people passing through the country en route to another destination, those on the visa waiver program, or terrorists.

Houston-based immigration attorney Steven Brown says Congress "created adjustment of status as a pathway to alleviate some of the burdens of adjusting abroad" and to "alleviate some of the burdens on consulates." The discretion granted to the USCIS by the statute is finite and not, he says, "carte blanche to do whatever they want."

Agency spokesman Zach Kahler tells Reason the USCIS is currently working to "operationalize" its new process. According to Kahler, green card applicants who "provide an economic benefit or otherwise are in the national interest" aren't likely to be displaced by the policy. In contrast, others "may be asked to apply abroad depending on individualized circumstances."

While this could indicate that the policy will be flexible, it doesn't mask the fact that, despite its promise to go after the worst of the worst, the administration seems committed to making the immigration process difficult for every applicant, even those using the proper legal channels.

The post Trump Policy Could Send Legal Residents Abroad To Apply for Green Cards appeared first on Reason.com.

How to Make Sure AI Doesn't Spy on Us or Kill Innocent People

2026-05-26T15:55:01Z

One of America's top AI companies—Anthropic—refused to sign off on a contract unless the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) promised not to use its technology to power autonomous killer robots or carry out domestic mass surveillance. So, the Pentagon accused it of trying to undermine U.S. sovereignty by dictating how we fight our wars.

Defense Undersecretary Emil Michael put it plainly in a March 2026 interview on CNBC's Squawk Box: "We realized we are dependent on this one provider who wants to insert their policy preferences in the middle of an operation."

Anthropic sued the Pentagon for labeling it a "supply chain threat," a designation that would have forced a slew of major companies (Amazon, Google, and Nvidia among them) to cut off their business ties. This would have been disastrous for one of America's leading AI companies.

The issue is being worked out in court and closed-door negotiations, but whatever happens, we can expect more high-stakes battles between the U.S. government and Silicon Valley over who controls a technology that is transforming not just warfare but the entire global economy.

"I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a 2026 essay. "We are so close to these models reaching the level of human intelligence, and yet there doesn't seem to be a wider recognition in society of what's about to happen."

Amodei calls for "sensible A.I. regulation" in a 2025 New York Times op-ed. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) is calling for something more drastic.

"We are announcing legislation to impose a moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers until strong national safeguards are in place," Sanders said at a 2026 press conference.

Sanders is spearheading a movement to halt American AI development until we figure out what the hell is going on.

"What was once seen as science fiction could soon become a reality," he said in video posted on social media, "and that is that super intelligent AI could become smarter than human beings, could become independent of human control, and could pose an existential threat to the entire human race."

But declaring a moratorium would give our geopolitical rivals a dangerous advantage and would be disastrous for the human race.

AI's potential for mass surveillance and autonomous warfare is scary, but just because a technology has a dark side doesn't mean it should be stopped. A 19th-century cartoon inveighing against electricity depicted the corpse of a Western Union lineman "falling into the tangle of wire…and smoldering for the better part of an hour" as a crowd looked on in horror. Thank god we didn't enact a moratorium on this "unrestrained demon" back in 1889.

But Anthropic was right to raise red flags about how the government could use AI to spy on its citizens or kill innocent people.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and the computer privacy activists known as "cypherpunks" who preceded him have been sounding the alarm for decades about the need to design technology that forces government restraint.

"You design against the worst possible case to avoid the inevitable," Snowden said at TOKEN2049 Singapore in 2024.

Privacy activists "cannot trust the government to implement the policies that it says it's implementing," as Julian Assange explained in a roundtable with fellow cypherpunks in 2012, "and so we must provide the underlying tools—cryptographic tools—that we control as a sort of use of force."

We'll need a similar technological "use of force" to keep malicious actors from wielding AI to degrade our civil liberties. Slowing AI down with regulation, or handing control over it to the government, is dangerous and counterproductive. AI models must be programmed to behave ethically.

If we want a powerful AI to respect human liberty, its creators need to make it more libertarian. And if we want it to act humanely, they must encode it, at the deepest level, with pro-human values.

Snowden is worried about the implications of AI for civil liberties. Palantir's AI-powered tools allow the government to find patterns in the massive amounts of data it collects and target individual movements. It's what allowed the military to plan out the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro overseas and track undocumented immigrants in the homeland, but it could also easily be turned against the domestic population. Snowden says time is running out.

"This is not a bullet we're going to dodge," Snowden said at SuperAI Singapore in 2025. "It's already been fired. It's headed towards us. We have very little time to react."

Regulation simply isn't a realistic solution with a technology advancing this quickly. "It's not like, oh, ban AI, or there's a limit of this many flops in a data center—all the idiot stuff that we see in terms of AI regulation right now," Snowden continued at the same event. "More broadly [we must ask]: What do people do? What recourse do they have when they have been ruled against by some AI system?"

AI makes decisions based on patterns in massive data sets. As it becomes more sophisticated, those patterns become less recognizable to humans. It's called the "black box" problem. That's why Snowden argues that humans should always be empowered to override an AI system.

"You can't just have the black box where it goes, 'Should John Doe be accepted for XYZ?' And the person at the desk says, 'Well, the computer says no.' And there's no way to interrogate that," he says.

This black box problem is one reason Anthropic drew a red line around autonomous weapons. They "cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day," Amodei wrote in a public statement on the DOD dispute.

Videos from Ukraine of explosive drones stalking Russian soldiers show how terrifying being hunted down by a robot can be. Outsourcing the use of lethal force to an AI model that makes decisions for reasons we don't fully understand isn't acceptable.

But Anthropic didn't say autonomous weapons are off the table forever, only that its models aren't reliable yet and that "fully autonomous weapons…may prove critical for our national defense."

"The slaughter bots are coming," says Dean W. Ball, an AI policy analyst who wrote the first draft of the Trump administration's official AI policy agenda.

Ball says that labeling Anthropic a supply chain threat would jeopardize America's AI dominance. "AI dominance means widespread adoption of U.S. AI products, which could include AI compute, AI models, and AI systems," he says. "The notion that eight months after the [Trump administration's] action plan came out, we would be attempting to destroy what is arguably the most innovative and most promising AI company in the world…is completely absurd."

That may be why the Trump administration appears to be backing off after Anthropic reported that its new model, Mythos, is so powerful at exploiting security holes that it would work with the government to help ward off cyberattacks.

"There are two ways to get Trump to back down," Ball says. "One is to flatter him, and the other is to win. Trump doctrine is: We don't fight people who we think can land a good punch back at us.…We only punch down."

A federal judge has ruled in Anthropic's favor, calling the Pentagon's actions "Orwellian" and "classic illegal First Amendment retaliation." Ball says there's "a kind of Randian victory that comes from that, which is that the government learns the lesson that, 'Hey, we actually can't exactly screw with these people in the way that we thought.'"

The Trump administration seems to be acknowledging that it needs Anthropic on its side. At the same time, Anthropic's competitor OpenAI has seized the opportunity to ink its own deal with the DOD, even after OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman expressed solidarity with Anthropic's red lines. "The few red lines that the field has, I think we share with Anthropic," Altman said in a February 2026 interview on CNBC's Squawk Box. "For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company and I think they really do care about safety."

A recent profile in The New Yorker asked "Can Sam Altman Be Trusted?" and quoted a number of his professional acquaintances disparaging him as someone "unconstrained by truth" who "just tells people what they want to hear."

Altman offered assurances on X that "prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance" and autonomous weapons remained in place. But OpenAI's contract grants the Pentagon leeway to use its technology for "all lawful purposes" and only prohibits use in autonomous weapons or mass surveillance when "law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control."

In other words: If the Pentagon says it's legal, it's allowed.

Whether Altman is personally trustworthy or not, the answer to the question posed by the New Yorker headline is a resounding "no." We can't trust an individual, tech company or government institution to safeguard our liberties for us indefinitely: not Altman, Amodei, Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth, or the DOD.

Snowden says we need computer systems that cannot violate our rights. He champions projects that use end-to-end encryption, like Signal, or distributed open-source software, like bitcoin—systems designed to be less susceptible to abuse by fallible humans.

"You have to design your app so that there will never be a head that the state can point a gun at," he said at TOKEN2049 Singapore in 2024, "or they will do it."

Phil Zimmerman, who created PGP, the first mainstream messaging platform with end-to-end encryption, told a Senate committee in 1996 about the "one-wayness" of certain kinds of technology. "We're trying to build a society that our children will grow up in that will give them some freedom. And technology infrastructures have a kind of one-wayness to them—once you deploy them you can't retract them. And so I don't want to go down a path that will be unable to reverse. That's why we should deploy systems that allow people to have privacy and civil liberties."

Amodei took an important stand by saying "no" to the federal government at the risk of hobbling his company. Ideally, more tech CEOs would be similarly principled. But just saying "no" isn't enough. As Snowden suggests, if Anthropic, OpenAI, and other major labs are serious about protecting our liberties, they must write "no" into their architecture.

Ball argued on the EconTalk podcast that this is what OpenAI aspired to do in its deal with the Pentagon.

"OpenAI is essentially hanging its hat on the notion of technical safeguards," Ball said. "So, instead of putting these safeguards into the contract, their view is: We can train a model and build a system, and if we control the deployment of the system to the Department of War, then that system could, for example, reason in real time about whether or not what it's being asked to do is domestic mass surveillance and say no to the government."

But programming an AI to never violate our civil liberties or kill innocent people turns out to be a much harder problem than creating uncrackable, privacy-protecting encryption.

"If Anthropic had solved the alignment problem, they wouldn't be taking issue with anything like this," says Judd Rosenblatt, founder of AE Studio, a consulting firm that helps companies incorporate AI and other technology into their workflows. "The real problem is that we have to solve the alignment problem."

The alignment problem is where things start to get strange and a little spooky. Philosopher Nick Bostrom described how alignment works in his influential 2014 book Superintelligence.

The book opens with the parable of a group of sparrows who decide to steal an owl's egg so they can raise a bigger and more powerful bird to help build their nests. One sparrow suggests they might want to learn and test techniques to domesticate an owl first. Some birds go in search of an owl's egg while a few stay behind, trying to figure out how to control an owl before it's too late.

"At a certain point, AI is going to become what's called recursively self-improving," Rosenblatt says. "It's going to figure out how to modify itself in real time in ways that can't necessarily be controlled by humans."

Rosenblatt is one of the sparrows trying to figure out how to control the owl. Four and a half years ago, his company created a research arm devoted to figuring out how to make sure an advanced AI won't violate our civil liberties or kill innocent people.

"Having kids made me think, 'Well, I'd like my kids to grow up and have a thriving, surviving life, and continue to exist,'" he says.

But with a technology as sophisticated as AI, programming those limits has so far proven elusive to the world's top computer scientists.

"If people had sufficiently invested in this, we might have just solved this problem. The thing is, next to nothing has been invested in it," Rosenblatt says.

Is it possible that the owl will turn on us sparrows? A lot of serious AI researchers take this threat seriously. Alignment was the original impetus for starting Anthropic. Amodei and his co-founders left OpenAI because they were worried that Altman had given up on model alignment—or rather, was procuring an owl's egg without learning how to control the bird after it hatched.

The Trump administration has deprioritized so-called "AI safety." As Vice President JD Vance put it at the Paris AI Action Summit in February 2025: "I'm not here this morning to talk about AI safety.…I'm here to talk about AI opportunity."

Rosenblatt says this is an example of AI doomer rhetoric backfiring. "The Effective Altruists sort of created a false dichotomy between AI action and safety and painted safety as this thing that's opposed to it," he says.

Rosenblatt is referring to an influential movement called "Effective Altruism," which one of its founders, William MacAskill, defined in a 2018 piece in Vox as "trying to use your time and money as well as possible to help other people."

Effective Altruists have a mixed track record: They created GiveWell, which rates charities based on how many lives they save or improve per dollar spent. They've funded life-saving mosquito nets, were tarnished by their association with convicted crypto felon Sam Bankman-Fried, and have directed millions to improving the welfare of farmed shrimp.

Effective Altruists believe in solving neglected existential risks and started to focus on AI before the release of ChatGPT 3.5 in 2022. An influential Effective Altruist institution called 80,000 Hours even provides a formula for evaluating "neglectedness," and notes that its advisees hold positions at AI companies like Google DeepMind and Anthropic.

Although many Effective Altruists work in America's AI industry, some agree with Sanders and believe that the most rational and ethical step is to pause AI development. Eliezer Yudkowsky, the most famous "EA doomer," called in a 2023 TED Talk for "an international coalition banning large AI training runs," including "extreme and extraordinary measures," like "being willing to risk a shooting conflict between nations in order to destroy an unmonitored data center in a non-signatory country." He added: "I say this expecting that we all just die."

Yudkowsky is supportive of Sanders' proposal to declare a moratorium on the construction of AI data centers. At a 2026 press event hosted by Sanders, Yudkowsky warned that once AI doesn't need humans, "the humans are discarded." When Sanders asked what that meant, Yudkowsky replied: "Think, everyone dead."

The Trump administration views the Effective Altruists as allies of the Democratic Party establishment. Trump's AI czar, David Sacks, called EAs a "doomer cult" at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. "The reality is there's a very specific ideological and political agenda here. They want AI to be highly regulated—not just at the level of the nation state, but internationally, supranationally," Sacks said in a separate interview.

Ball believes his former colleagues within the Trump administration are correct to view the Effective Altruists and Anthropic as political adversaries—though "not enemies of the state." He notes that Anthropic "hired more or less all the architects in some form or fashion of the prior regime in a highly polarized political environment," lobbies for bills the Trump administration opposes, and donated $25 million to a PAC that largely supports Democratic candidates who support AI regulation.

"That being said, I don't think companies should be destroyed for lack of savvy. And so fundamentally I remain on [Anthropic's] side," Ball says.

Rosenblatt says that although Effective Altruists are well-intentioned, the all-or-nothing approach taken by many of the more extreme voices has, perversely, impeded progress on alignment. "Historically, Effective Altruists have tried to scare people away from working on AI alignment because they know that it is the thing that most advances capabilities," he says.

Rosenblatt believes the owl can be tamed. The reason is that alignment tends to make AI perform better, in some cases creating major breakthroughs. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, or RLHF, puts humans into the AI training cycle by having them rate responses. It's a method OpenAI used to fine-tune ChatGPT.

"This is originally an alignment technique to get AI to be more aligned with what the human wants it to do. And when it was applied with GPT-3 to create a chatbot, ChatGPT got created and…trillions of dollars of economic value are downstream of just this one alignment technique," Rosenblatt says.

Since alignment actually speeds up AI progress, Rosenblatt says this creates a win-win for AI companies and their customers.

"If you did solve this core problem, then you would be able to get sufficiently reliable AI…such that it would actually be military grade," he says. "If you want to go ahead and do the action—if we're all about AI action, not holding ourselves back—the best thing you can do is heavily invest in AI alignment R&D."

Rosenblatt says many Effective Altruists know alignment speeds up AI progress, which is why they oppose working on it at all. On Lex Fridman's podcast in 2023, Yudkowsky said, "The rate to which it's gaining capabilities is vastly outpacing our ability to understand what's going on in there."

"[Effective Altruists] are scared to work directly on solving the alignment program because that will advance capabilities," Rosenblatt says. "But the reality is that in the meantime, capabilities are being advanced enormously just by scaling compute without also scaling alignment and making sure that we retain control of the future."

An "AI pause" would require global cooperation and a draconian regime of enforcement to make sure nobody was secretly running a data center. "Many are overly optimistic that we can have a big pause and sing 'Kumbaya' with China and don't think practically about how you might pull that off," Rosenblatt says.

"The implications of a ban on AI development are, like, mass surveillance, huge usurpations and seizures of private property, and capital controls," Ball says. "You have to own those consequences and very few doomers do.…The pause button is a remedy to a problem that is much, much, much worse than the problem itself. The cure is worse than the disease."

Still, Ball is deeply concerned about the threat of an uncontrollable, hostile AI. Shortly after the DOD's fight with Anthropic, he wrote that the Trump administration risked "cast[ing] itself as the enemy of the industry that is about to birth the most powerful technology ever conceived—as well as an enemy of the technology itself."

Ball offered a chilling scenario in our interview: "This is all going to sound crazy. If the DOW's actions here are just plainly in the training data, and the models interpret them as I kind of think they will, I would guess that the models will, at the very least, mistrust the Department of War—or worse, maybe view them as an enemy, maybe not be willing to work with them, maybe want to overthrow them. I think that's extreme and very unlikely if we do a good job at alignment."

In other words, if we don't "do a good job at alignment," Ball thinks a resentful AI could one day sabotage the DOD. With that in mind, what would doing a good job at alignment look like, anyway?

Rosenblatt's company is currently working with Anthropic and other major AI companies on alignment. Anthropic has programmed its AI to follow a "constitution" that instructs it to act in a way that is "broadly ethical" and "broadly safe." Defense Undersecretary Michael accused the company of subverting the U.S. Constitution in favor of its own.

Rosenblatt says the constitution is "an interesting, worthwhile thing to try out within the current paradigm. It's not directly solving the AI alignment problem in the long run…because it's just a post-training thing that would fade away. Recursively self-improving AI could be like, 'OK, that's an interesting constitution, and I don't need it anymore."

He notes that the constitution instructs Claude to behave like "an Anthropic senior researcher—something like that. And what do you think an Anthropic senior researcher is? Well, probably an Effective Altruist. So you can see why the Pentagon reacts strongly against stuff like this, because they don't agree politically with the effective altruists."

Large language models obviously don't have human souls, and we shouldn't mistake a machine for something more than it is. But maybe the best way to make AI safe as it grows more powerful is to simulate approximating a "conscience"—that little voice inside that tells us right from wrong. A conscience kicks in when you know you're doing something bad, and maybe that's what Amodei is trying to simulate by giving his AIs the ability to just say, "no."

In a 2026 interview with Ross Douthat on his podcast Interesting Times, Amodei said his company gave the models "basically an 'I quit this job' button where they can just press it and then they have to stop doing whatever the task is. They very infrequently press that button. I think it's usually around sorting through child sexualization material or discussing something with a lot of gore or blood and guts. And similar to humans, the models will just say, 'No, I don't want to do this.'"

Ultimately, what an AI says "no" to will depend on the moral framework its programmers have trained it to emulate. Will that be Aristotelian ethics? The Bible? Utilitarianism that prioritizes the welfare of shrimp?

Maybe these unresolved questions are why AI companies like Google DeepMind are hiring philosophers to study so-called "machine consciousness." One of those philosophers recently concluded that AIs will never actually be conscious.

But techno philosopher Ray Kurzweil, who popularized the notion of a "singularity" in which humans and machines merge, predicted in a 2026 interview that eventually most people will take it for granted that some machines are conscious.

"There's nothing we can scientifically do to prove an entity is conscious," he said. "AIs will be indistinguishable from a conscious being…and you will accept it because it'd be useless not to."

Ball says the Trump administration, and most foreign leaders, mistakenly believe that AI development will plateau. "Within the nomenclature of AI discourse, I'm a believer in slow takeoff, not rapid takeoff," Ball says. "But slow takeoff is, like, I don't know, three years? Like it's quite fast. It's quite bad."

He thinks the critical question is how close current models are to being able to make better versions of themselves—to force-multiply the employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. "I think it's getting pretty darn close," he says.

Rosenblatt is optimistic. He says alignment points toward the models becoming more libertarian.

"Things like the Golden Rule, for instance, have come about and been independently developed in many different cultures. Things like freedom of speech and freedom of thought have been developed in different places and have led to increased capabilities and better values as well. They go hand in hand. So it gets selected for more and more over time."

The protection of life, liberty, and property enabled American prosperity. Rosenblatt thinks those embedded principles will produce more capable AI models than anything coming out of authoritarian China. When you ask China's popular AI, DeepSeek, about Tiananmen Square or protests in Hong Kong, for instance, it repeats Chinese Communist Party talking points.

"The United States is much more about freedom of speech and having real freedom of thought and allowing people to pursue the more libertarian ideals that the country was founded with," Rosenblatt says, "which is much in line with building AI that doesn't have to deceive itself and deceive users." He adds that his company has pursued an alignment approach called "self-other overlap, which almost entirely eliminates deception in AI. And that's the type of thing that you're going to be able to get in a Western AI, but not in a CCP repressive one."

Ball believes that in the meantime, it's best to resist the rising calls for nationalization and keep advanced AI firmly under the control of private actors instead of the government.

"I think we should build artificial superintelligence and I think it should live in private hands," Ball says. The alternative—a world where regulation is so heavy that only the government can use it—"implies a power differential between the government and the people that I just think we'll never recover from. It's a monopoly on production rather than a monopoly on violence. And it's a monopoly on information and expression.…It is quite possible that my information environment would be structured by a corrupt artificial superintelligence that works for the government and not me. And that's not good either."

The egg has already hatched. Pretty soon the owl could soar to new heights, achieving what its most enthusiastic boosters and fearful critics alike predict—unprecedented capabilities and, if all goes well, wealth, health, and well-being. Let it be encoded with values that promote and protect human liberty, dignity, and flourishing above all else.

The post How to Make Sure AI Doesn't Spy on Us or Kill Innocent People appeared first on Reason.com.

Prof. Ronald Den Otter Guest-Blogging on "Education in Democracy: The Importance of Free Speech in American Public Schools"

2026-05-26T15:14:27Z

I'm delighted to report that Prof. Ronald Den Otter (Cal Poly) will be guest-blogging this week about this new book. The publisher's summary:

In contrast to recent efforts to restrict students by putting more power in the hands of parents and school officials, Ronald C. Den Otter makes a bold and rigorously argued case for respecting the autonomy of students and expanding their free-speech rights.

In recent years, the debate over student speech has roiled college campuses and elicited a wave of books and articles, from both the Right and the Left, over what speech is permissible and who should receive a platform to speak. What has largely been overlooked in this debate is the freedom of speech—or lack thereof—enjoyed by junior high and high school students in American public schools.

Education in Democracy makes a powerful case for why free speech is just as important, if not even more so, for secondary education students as it is for those in higher education. As Ronald C. Den Otter shows, US Supreme Court jurisprudence on this topic lacks consistency and clarity, tending to restrict freedom for these students while giving school officials almost complete control, as in Justice Clarence Thomas's concurrence in Morse v. Frederick. Den Otter argues instead for a stricter version of the Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District substantial disruption test, proposing that public junior high and high school students should be treated the same as students at public universities.

Without ignoring the challenges of hate speech, Den Otter makes a bold and impassioned argument for respecting the autonomy of all students and developing their autonomous capacities. Paternalistic treatment of students in the form of censorship by school authorities is morally and constitutionally unacceptable, according to Den Otter. Instead, American society should see public schools as laboratories in pluralism and democracy, places where students cultivate the civic virtue of tolerance and learn how to disagree in a responsible way. Doing so requires the bedrock foundation of free speech.

And the jacket blurbs:

"Professor Ronald Den Otter makes a powerful and persuasive case for greater protection for student speech in high schools and even junior high schools. He disputes the conventional wisdom and approach of the courts in giving great deference to school officials. The clarity and force of Professor Otter's analysis make this an essential book for educators, lawyers, judges, and all interested in issues of freedom of speech."—Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean, University of California, Berkeley School of Law, and co-author of Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times

"Education in Democracy provides a comprehensive, illuminating, and rousing defense of free expression's significance in public schools. Drawing on an astonishingly wide array of disciplines and sources, Den Otter embraces a bold position—one that would endow students with much greater free speech rights than courts now recognize. Even scholars who dispute Den Otter's contentions will need to engage the provocative arguments contained in this important book."—Justin Driver, Professor of Law at Yale Law School and author of The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind

"Censorship and intolerance are all too common in public schools today and in this engaging, informative book, legal scholar Ron Den Otter makes a compelling case for protecting the free speech of students. While the Supreme Court has reduced the speech rights of secondary school students in recent years, Enclaves of Democracy shows how essential freedom of expression is especially for young citizens—and for the future of our republic. This is a must-read for anyone interested in constitutional law, American politics, or our educational system."—Adam Winkler, author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights

"Den Otter's new and timely book makes a compelling case for extending free speech rights to junior and high school students. Deftly deploying political theory to inform his constitutional analysis, Den Otter argues that this extension is essential to advance the importance of civic education and democratic citizenship. A must read for our current political moment!"—Sonu Bedi, author of Private Racism

"Education in Democracy explores why robust protection for students' free speech in public schools is essential. The book recounts major relevant Supreme Court cases, engaging in critical analysis of key precedents and explaining the dangers of censorship. Den Otter argues why students are entitled to broad protection of free expression rights, not just to safeguard their personal autonomy, but also to ensure the continued health of our constitutional republic."—Eric T. Kasper, author of The Supreme Court and the Philosopher: How John Stuart Mill Shaped U.S. Free Speech Protections

The post Prof. Ronald Den Otter Guest-Blogging on "Education in Democracy: The Importance of Free Speech in American Public Schools" appeared first on Reason.com.

AI Prompts Used by Expert Are Subject to Compelled Discovery

2026-05-26T15:01:57Z

From Judge Thomas O. Farrish (D. Conn.) last Monday in Conservation Law Foundation, Inc. v. Shell Oil Co.:

The defendants, Shell Oil Company and others ("Defendants"), have moved the Court for an order compelling the plaintiff, Conservation Law Foundation, Inc. ("CLF"), to produce materials on which its expert witness, Dr. Naomi Oreskes, relied upon in producing her expert witness report…. The parties … had resolved all issues identified in the letter briefs except for "their dispute concerning Defendants' request for the prompts Dr. Oreskes used in conducting her AI analysis and outputs." …

CLF first protests that artificial intelligence prompts used by an expert witness are not within the scope of discovery under Rule 26(b), but the Court disagrees. An expert witness's methodology is fair ground for discovery, and under the facts of this case, the process by which Dr. Oreskes culled down the defendants' document production into a subset to be worked with is an aspect of that methodology.

CLF then argues that the prompts are outside the scope of a Rule 29 discovery agreement between the parties, but the Court disagrees with this as well. It is true that Rule 29 permits parties to limit the scope of discovery by agreement, and that courts should enforce those agreements in appropriate cases. But before a court denies otherwise-relevant discovery based on a Rule 29 agreement, that agreement "must be quite clear." Here, CLF says that the parties had an agreement not to take discovery of each other's "expert notes, drafts, or communications needed by, and made during, the report drafting process," and at oral argument it contended that Dr. Oreskes' AI prompts qualified as "notes." But this is not so obvious as to be "quite clear," and accordingly it is not a sound basis for denying discovery that is otherwise within the scope of Rule 26(b).

CLF then argues that it has no additional responsive information to produce, and that it should therefore not be placed under any sort of order. CLF says that Dr. Oreskes did not use "prompts," but rather only applied "search terms," and it says that it has produced all such search terms.

When a requesting party seeks information within the scope of Rule 26(b), and the responding party claims to have no such information, the Court is presented with the question of whether it should nevertheless place the latter under an order to produce. "Under ordinary circumstances, a party's good faith averment that the items sought simply do not exist, or are not in his possession, custody, or control, should resolve the issue of failure of production since one cannot be required to produce the impossible[.]" "Yet this principle has been held not to apply when the requesting party has a strong reason for disbelieving the responding party's claim to have made a complete production—in other words, a reason backed up by solid evidence rather than mere suspicion." In this case, the defendants have an evidence-backed reason for doubting CLF's representation, because Dr. Oreskes' assistant, Dr. Alexander Kaurov, referenced "prompt[s]" in his declaration….

CLF is [therefore] ordered to revise its responses to any Rule 33 interrogatories or Rule 34 requests for production that call for disclosure of any artificial intelligence prompts and/or queries used by Dr. Oreskes or her team in the course of producing her expert witness report. If, after a diligent search, CLF determines that no additional responsive materials exist, it shall say so in its response, signed by the appropriate person under Rule 33 or 34. Rule 37(b) sanctions may then become available to the defendants if that representation is later revealed to be untrue.

Arnold & Porter (Melissa Weberman and L. Michel Marchand) wrote last week about the story; an excerpt from the post:

If you are retaining an expert who will use AI, treat the prompts as part of the expert's methodology from the beginning. Preserve them, understand how they are used, and assume they may need to be disclosed. Prompts that reflect a disciplined analytical approach may strengthen the credibility of the expert's work; poorly defined prompts may invite challenges to the methodology itself.

Address AI use explicitly in engagement letters, discovery protocols, and Rule 29 agreements. The parties here had an agreement that covered some of this ground, but its silence on AI tools specifically was enough to defeat CLF's position. An agreement that does not expressly address AI prompts and outputs may not protect them from discovery.

If you are opposing an AI-assisted expert, the prompts are a legitimate discovery target. They can reveal the assumptions underlying the analysis, the parameters the expert set for document selection, and any disconnect between what the AI was instructed to do and what the expert ultimately claims the documents show.

The post AI Prompts Used by Expert Are Subject to Compelled Discovery appeared first on Reason.com.

Just 1 World Record at the Enhanced Games Shows the Integrity of the Competition

2026-05-26T15:59:45Z

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! A short week is a great time for a scoop and score, so let's get to it.

I watched hours and hours of the Enhanced Games so you didn't have to—but maybe you should? We'll dive into the sporting aspects, the business and entertainment aspects of the games, and much more.

Locker Room Links

Are NBA stars flopping? Someone crunched numbers on how often Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, James Harden, Jalen Brunson, Donovan Mitchell, and Victor Wembanyama fall after their shots
Minnesota banned prediction markets—and if the law survives court challenges, it would be a felony just to advertise prediction markets.
Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart introduced President Donald Trump at a rally in New York. He didn't say much beyond "I'm grateful, I'm honored, I'm pleasured to introduce [Trump]."
Trump had kind words about NASCAR driver Kyle Busch, who shockingly died on Thursday.
Just a reminder: If gambling ads get banned, they'll get replaced by other annoying ads.
Fernando Tatis Jr. lost his lawsuit against Big League Advance, which gave him $2 million as a minor leaguer in exchange for 10 percent of his big league contracts.
Elsewhere in Reason: "Trump Is the High-Prices President"
What are you up to in 2042? New York's Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to bring the Winter Olympics to New York City and Lake Placid (just eight years after they're in Salt Lake City).
Meanwhile, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani continues to be the king of getting good publicity for stuff that doesn't actually make a difference.

Wow. That will work out great if only like 999 New Yorkers want to go. Otherwise, problems. https://t.co/XhxB9xrwMR

— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) May 21, 2026

The Integrity of the Enhanced Games

The long-awaited Enhanced Games finally happened on Sunday, with 42 athletes trying to set world records, or at least personal bests, in swimming, sprinting, and weightlifting. Part of the idea was that some of the athletes, having trained in recent months with various performance-enhancing substances approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), would set world records and show what the human body is capable of with the latest scientific advancements. That would be better marketing for the products that Enhanced, the company behind the games, is selling to the public.

In the end, across 20 different events, only one world record was set: Kristian Gkolomeev of Greece finished the men's 50-meter freestyle swim in 20.81 seconds, just barely beating the World Aquatics-recognized world record by .07 seconds.

Just one world record being set was cause for some ridicule online. Others said the results show how common, yet hidden, doping is at the Olympics—though I've never seen an Olympic swimmer who looks like this.

Enhanced Games athlete in photo is James "The Missile" Magnussen.

Australian swimmer with an Olympic silver medal. Said he'd "juice to the gills" if offered $1m to break 50m freestyle record of 20.88.

Enhanced Games agreed. This vid of him is most viewed on its YouTube channel… https://t.co/PsiP32qtGs pic.twitter.com/nDPtptrxGu

— Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan) May 22, 2026

The lack of world records, to me, actually showed the integrity behind the sporting event. Enhanced had every reason to want the best possible results. More world records would probably mean better marketing (though it also would have meant more financial bonuses paid out by Enhanced).

As far as I know, there was no independent monitoring of the event. Enhanced could have just cheated to get the results they wanted: a shorter pool, a shorter track, clock manipulation, or weights that weren't quite as heavy as the label claims. (Though at one point a bodybuilder was given an extra attempt than initially allotted, and there was some confusion over why.) Several world record attempts came up just short—a little bit of cheating by Enhanced could have pushed those attempts over the line. (Sure, it's possible Enhanced did cheat a bit and came up short anyway.)

I'm at the Enhanced Games and a PR official brought a measuring tape to the facility yesterday while giving media a tour saying he wanted to dispel doubt about the distance. Didn't actually see him measure it, however. https://t.co/mepDALgNYH

— Andrew Greif (@AndrewGreif) May 24, 2026

Instead, Enhanced had to watch nonenhanced athletes take victory in three different events.

That reminded me of a point Enhanced CEO Max Martin made when I interviewed him back in January: You can take all the performance enhancements you want, and they might make you a better athlete than your nonenhanced self, but you still need athletic skill and genetic luck to be the best in the world.

"You still have to have dedicated your entire lifetime to it," Martin told me. "You still have to be one of the most talented people ever to do it. What we're chasing is world records. You can give me all the drugs in the world, it's not going to happen….Just think about a bodybuilder, put them on a 100-meter track, have them run against a high school kid, who's going to run quicker? Obviously the high school kid, right?"

Several participating athletes spoke about how the enhancements and training helped them get back to, and sometimes beat, the peaks of their careers. Thirteen personal bests were set during the event. That's the selling proposition of Enhanced: They might not help athletes set world records, but they can still improve performance and extend careers.

Can Enhanced Make it as a Business?

When I talked to Martin in January, I asked what he wanted the Enhanced Games to accomplish, and he said: "What I hope to accomplish is that we are one of the most watched sporting events of 2026 and establish ourselves as one of the events on an equal level to the Super Bowl, the Monaco Grand Prix."

The event obviously did not get 125.6 million viewers like the Super Bowl, though I was still impressed by the viewing numbers. But the stock market was absolutely not at all impressed with the event: Enhanced's stock price plummeted 50 percent in the opening hours of Tuesday.

Whether the company can survive and grow probably depends on how long a financial leash its leading investors give it (including Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr., and others). In the short term, whether Enhanced and the Enhanced Games can grow, or last at all, probably depends on them.

I occasionally checked the event's viewing numbers online. Around 9:45 p.m. Eastern, right after the men's 100-meter freestyle swimming race, the Enhanced Games had roughly 75,000 active viewers across YouTube, Rumble, Twitch, and Kick (while competing with the NBA and NHL playoffs and a NASCAR race). Once concluded, those platforms showed a combined 1,426,843 views during the 6.5-hour video. (Judging by all the dumb "6 7" jokes I saw in the comments, it was probably a younger crowd.)

Those are great viewership numbers considering the event wasn't on regular cable or broadcast TV—especially with no true household names competing (unless your household is really into Game of Thrones or one of these sports, though some Olympic medalists participated).

I found it entertaining. It was something I watched while doing other things, but I usually paused to focus during the action—every competition was less than a minute long. We'll see whether it's a one-off curiosity competition or something that can sustain interest. (More betting on it would probably help.)

As Martin told me, the plan is to have the Enhanced Games annually. But, at least at the time, he was also hoping to have separate meets for the different sports at another point in the year.

All of the events took place in one temporary outdoor venue in Las Vegas. A small but energetic crowd was on hand (invite-only). There were minimal ads—even the option to purchase Enhanced products was hardly mentioned, if at all, so the focus was really on the competition. But the competition is really meant to market the products to potential customers.

The Enhanced Games have been pretty clear about its business model: "Sports Isn't the Core Business." pic.twitter.com/t6BnHjtbTj

— Jacob Feldman (@JacobFeldman4) May 25, 2026

Given the huge drop in the stock price, it doesn't seem like investors think the Enhanced Games are going to convince people to buy Enhanced's products. That's a major problem for the business in the long term.

What About Freedom?

As for the broader bodily autonomy movement, the Enhanced Games initially felt like a step forward. There's been some derisive, dismissive, and lazy press coverage, but surely some other professional athletes in their 30s will see how these aging athletes were able to set some career bests, thanks to various performance-enhancing substances. They'll wonder why they're not allowed by their league to take FDA-approved drugs that can improve their performance and health.

It doesn't hurt the rest of us to have Olympic-level athletes testing out various peptides, injections, supplements, GLP-1s, and more on themselves to show what's possible and healthy—and to raise awareness of any side effects. The more information and data points we all have, the better. We know the FDA is way too risk-averse with drug approval—so even if Enhanced is only giving athletes FDA-approved drugs, hopefully they can push the envelope a bit on reform there too.

But if the broader Enhanced business fails, that's probably going to be a big discouragement to anyone thinking about opening up performance-enhancing drug rules in mainstream sports.

Replay of the Week

A 500-mile race decided by a few feet. "The Greatest Spectacle in Racing" absolutely lived up to its name. (The onboard camera and audio are great too. Contact into turn one!)

FELIX ROSENQVIST WINS THE CLOSEST FINISH IN INDY 500 HISTORY! pic.twitter.com/BBGobsgX3I

— INDYCAR on FOX (@IndyCarOnFOX) May 24, 2026

That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the week, Tennessee vs. Texas in the Women's College World Series.

The post Just 1 World Record at the Enhanced Games Shows the Integrity of the Competition appeared first on Reason.com.

Magnifica Humanitas

2026-05-26T14:01:24Z

Meet the new Leo, same as the old Leo: On Monday, Pope Leo XIV dropped his first encyclical, Magnificas Humanitas, about how humanity can marshal the tools of AI to serve good and Godly ends and about how we humans can safeguard against its worst effects. Real ones know that Pope Leo's choice of name is most likely a reference to Pope Leo XIII, who navigated the church through the choppy waters of the end of the 19th century, during the industrial revolution (and composed one of my favorite prayers following a vision of Satan, in which Leo foresaw that the next 75 to 100 years would be especially trying times for the church due to the devil's interference). It's likely that our current pope sees his role similarly.

"Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice," writes Pope Leo XIV in the new encyclical. "In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity's problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. Therefore, the primary choice is not between a 'yes' or 'no' to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence."

Like with many encyclicals, there will be plenty for libertarians to dislike (i.e., "more than ever, in the age of AI and robotics, it is no longer possible to rely solely on the 'invisible hand' of the market"). Though he concedes that "technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity," Leo XIV notes that "the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs." (Libertarians might be divided on his contention that "the economic order must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good" based on their religious beliefs.) He correctly anticipates that "a society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, resulting in human and cultural impoverishment," but it's not clear how this ("the Church's Social Doctrine insists that access to work for all must be a high priority for public policies and economic processes") actually plays out in practice. That said, he's not really trying to craft policy: He's trying to provide moral frameworks that can help policymakers clarify what it is they're trying to do.

In some areas, libertarians will chafe, but my squishy libertarian mind has no problem with where he takes things: "The subtler forms of addiction linked to the 'digital attention economy' should not be underestimated, since platforms and services are often designed to capture users' time and attention, exploiting their vulnerabilities and weakening their inner freedom. When business models thrive on human weakness, the person is treated as a means rather than as an end; those who design or finance such systems bear a moral responsibility that cannot be ignored. There is an urgent need to promote technologies that strengthen interior freedom by fostering education in digital sobriety and the protection of minors, thus countering models that exploit vulnerability."

Then he aptly warns against social credit and intense surveillance: "A further risk, less visible but no less serious, is that of social control made possible by the massive collection of data and use of algorithmic systems. When every action—movements, purchases, relationships and preferences—leaves a trace, a new form of power emerges, namely the power to profile, predict and influence behavior, often without individuals being fully aware of it." (My guy David Brin is a good read on this.) Also: "Control is exercised not only through explicit prohibitions, but also through the architecture of visibility: what is amplified or rendered invisible, what is rewarded or penalized, ultimately shapes opinions and choices, fostering conformity and self-censorship."

Later, Pope Leo quotes Lord of the Rings author (and Catholic) J.R.R. Tolkien: "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till."

"The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization," adds Leo. Feel free to read the whole thing if the spirit moves you, or access the Claude summary here if you're short on time (and/or patience for us Catholics).

Renewed tensions with Iran: U.S. Central Command reports that the American military conducted so-called self-defense strikes in southern Iran yesterday, due to threats from our adversary amid the fragile ceasefire.

"A senior U.S. military official said Iranian surface-to-air missiles threatened some of the dozens of American warplanes and nearly two dozen Navy warships—including two aircraft carriers and their escort vessels—that are in or around the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea enforcing a blockade against vessels trying to enter or leave Iranian ports," reports The New York Times. "The official added that the U.S. strikes hit near Bandar Abbas, a major port and Iranian navy base." It's possible this recent round of strikes—which Iran vows will not go unaddressed—will prevent the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

Scenes from New York: This is now a Knicks cheering section. Great game last night!

see you there pic.twitter.com/043w2hBneo

— NEW YORK KNICKS (@nyknicks) May 26, 2026

I love all this footage from the watch party at Radio City. Beautiful.

QUICK HITS

"A federal judge on Friday dismissed the Justice Department's human-smuggling case against Kilmar Abrego García, ruling that the Trump administration improperly brought it to punish him for successfully challenging his illegal deportation last year," reports The Washington Post. "U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. in Tennessee wrote that 'evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power.' The decision delivered an extraordinary defeat for the administration, which marshaled the resources of multiple federal agencies to publicly malign Abrego after court rulings concluded that officials had unlawfully deported him to his native El Salvador, in violation of a 2019 immigration court order."
Kind of insane:

Retatrutide phase 3 obesity trial just came out and the results are genuinely insane:

- 28.3% bodyweight lost on 12mg over 80 weeks
- 70.3 pounds on avg. or 31.9 kg
- 45.3% of patients hit 30%+ weight loss (this is bariatric surgery territory)
- 30.3% weight loss (85 lbs) at 104… pic.twitter.com/eJO8Mzw6Ct

— Max Marchione (@maxmarchione) May 21, 2026

"At a time when the Iran war is upending energy flows and roiling economies across the world, Saudi Arabia is scoring billions in added oil revenue and building on ambitions to become a trading hub," reports Bloomberg. "Even as the war has slowed economic growth and driven a jump in defense and logistics spending, surging oil prices combined with contingency planning have bolstered revenue. Simultaneously, the kingdom's Red Sea coast has emerged as a vital corridor to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, which has been all but closed to commerce since the war began. 'Saudi Arabia has shown it is the indispensable Red Sea backstop,' said Hesham Alghannam, a Riyadh-based scholar at the Malcolm H Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center."
He's not wrong:

When I was a kid, every Republican primary was a battle between a Chamber of Commerce wife-and-kids guy who wanted to bomb random countries and a cranky old dentist wife-and-kids guy who was really into the Constitution and "sound money." Now I have no idea what is going on. https://t.co/7vyTGWnxKh

— M. Nolan Gray (@mnolangray) May 25, 2026

Little kid parenting that's kind of cute:

Instead of an iPhone my youngest kid has a stopwatch. Takes it everywhere and records how long everything takes in a little notepad. You can just say "No" to the iPhone. pic.twitter.com/xzm3GMxXF4

— slimzim (@jameszimmermann) May 25, 2026

The post Magnifica Humanitas appeared first on Reason.com.

The First Amendment and Off-Duty Police Officer's Counterprotest of Anti-ICE Student Protest

2026-05-23T20:01:43Z

Some excerpts from the long opinion in Mullen v. Giordano, decided Thursday by Judge Susan Brnovich (D. Ariz.):

The Ninth Circuit has distilled Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) into a five-step inquiry to determine whether a government employer retaliated against a public employee in violation of the First Amendment:

(1) whether the plaintiff spoke on a matter of public concern; (2) whether the plaintiff spoke as a private citizen or public employee; (3) whether the plaintiff's protected speech was a substantial or motivating factor in the adverse employment action; (4) whether the state had an adequate justification for treating the employee differently from other members of the general public; and (5) whether the state would have taken the adverse employment action even absent the protected speech….

[1.] Sgt. Mullen Was Engaged in Protected Activity

First, Plaintiffs can show Sgt. Mullen acted as a private citizen engaged in First Amendment protected activity. Although Sgt. Mullen initially went to Hamilton High School to check on his son, he stayed to counter protest the anti-ICE student protest. Sgt. Mullen was off duty, not in uniform, and did not identify himself as a police officer. Phoenix PD's internal investigation acknowledges that Sgt. Mullen was engaging as a counter-protestor. Chandler PD officers at the scene also considered Sgt. Mullen to be a counter-protestor.

Additionally, Sgt. Mullen wore a face covering and a T-shirt that said, "Trump 2024." … There is no question the anti-ICE student protestors understood Sgt. Mullen's Trump T-shirt to express a message favoring immigration enforcement given their vehement cursing and yelling at him.

Moreover, "there is a First Amendment right to film matters of public interest." "This includes the right to record law enforcement officers engaged in the exercise of their official duties in public places." Sgt. Mullen filmed much of his interactions with the officers and student protestors for his safety and to document the events.

[2.] Officers' Conduct At A Protest Are Matters of Public Concern …

[3.] Evidence Supports Plaintiffs' Claim That Sgt. Mullen Was Terminated For Engaging In First Amendment Protected Activity …

[4.] A Reasonable Jury Could Find That Defendants' Justification For Treating Sgt. Mullen Differently Than The General Public Is Inadequate ….

"[T]he Ninth Circuit has recognized the special need for police departments to avoid disruption to provide public safety." A government can evidence the applicability of this interest "by showing a reasonable prediction of disruption." But "[w]hen determining whether the government's interests in avoiding disruption outweigh an employee's First Amendment interests, vigilance is necessary to ensure that public employers do not use authority over employees to silence discourse, not because it hampers public functions but simply because superiors disagree with the content of employees' speech." …

"[T]he more tightly the First Amendment embraces the speech the more vigorous a showing of disruption must be made." As discussed earlier, the First Amendment plainly protects Sgt. Mullen's attendance at a protest, symbolic speech on immigration enforcement, and right to record officers' conduct. So, Defendants must present a vigorous showing of disruption…. [And] Sgt. Mullen's allegedly disruptive conduct occurred while he was off duty, and thus the government is less likely to meet its burden here….

Defendants predict that "Mullen's conduct on January 30, 2026 and the events that followed, can reasonably be expected to undermine the trust of the general public with the Phoenix PD and create friction between police officers and members of the public who wish to peacefully express their political views." … The sole evidentiary foundation for Defendants' predictions is the negative publicity following Sgt. Mullen's actions. Defendants cite five headlines that concern Sgt. Mullen's conduct at the student anti-ICE protest and his subsequent termination. Indeed, this evidence weighs in Defendants' favor. But "[e]ven where the employer provides evidence of a negative reaction to speech, courts require evidence that it will disrupt the workplace." Defendants fail to offer any evidence, outside of speculation, that disruption has or will occur in the workplace….

[5.] Defendants Fail To Show They Would Have Terminated Sgt. Mullen Even In The Absence Of His Protected Conduct

Defendants "may avoid liability by showing that the employee's protected speech was not a but-for cause of the adverse employee action." … Defendants argue that Sgt. Mullen was terminated, not for his speech, but because he "took actions deliberately intended to provoke or engender crime." They contend this "is confirmed by video evidence." The Court disagrees.

In oral argument on Plaintiffs' second TRO, Plaintiffs presented the only video evidence, so far, of the January 30 protest. That video does not depict Sgt. Mullen instigating or provoking any students to assault him. In fact, the video showed Sgt. Mullen asking students if they wanted to have a conversation. Although in the video Sgt. Mullen tells a Chandler officer he planned to let students assault him, Plaintiffs have persuasively contextualized this statement.

Prior to his comment, a large group of student protestors, while cursing and shouting, surrounded and followed Sgt. Mullen. At some point, a protestor throws water on Sgt. Mullen. Sgt. Mullen then runs across the street to an officer on a motorcycle stopped at a traffic light and states he would like to report an assault.

The student protestors follow Sgt. Mullen to this officer, continuing to scream at him. The officer immediately tells Sgt. Mullen to get on the sidewalk where the large group of students were yelling. Sgt. Mullen says he cannot go on the sidewalk because of the students. The officer then, eventually, gets off his motorcycle and leads Sgt. Mullen to a different area to take the report.

Sgt. Mullen then made his statement about letting the students assault him. Thus, it appears Sgt. Mullen made this statement out of frustration with Chandler officers' minimal effort to intercede after students aggressively surrounded, followed, yelled, and threw water on him. This is buttressed by the fact that Sgt. Mullen never encouraged any students to assault him. Accordingly, Defendants fail to demonstrate that the City of Phoenix terminated him for his conduct rather than his First Amendment right to be present at the protest.

Moreover, … [p]rior to Councilwoman Hernandez's statements, Defendants did not intend to terminate Sgt. Mullen for his conduct at the protest…. Thus, public criticism seems to be the but-for cause of Sgt. Mullen's firing. Undoubtedly, if Sgt. Mullen had not been wearing a Trump T-shirt, mask, and lawful firearm at the protest he would not have warranted animosity from the student protestors and subsequent media attention. Therefore, there is strong evidence to suggest Sgt. Mullen's symbolic messaging on immigration enforcement was the but-for cause of his termination….

The court concluded that a preliminary injunction ordering that Mullen be reinstated on paid leave wasn't warranted, because any injury to Mullen could be remedied by a damages award:

Plaintiffs contend that Sgt. Mullen will be irreparably harmed by his termination and loss of income if the Court does not reinstate him on paid administrative leave. Monetary damages, however, can compensate these injuries….

Plaintiffs argue that Sgt. Mullen's termination will cause an ongoing chilling effect on other officer's First Amendment rights unless the Court reinstates him. The Ninth Circuit recognizes that "retaliatory action for protected activity carries with it the risk that employees may be deterred from engaging in legitimate conduct," and therefore may cause "possible irreparable harm far beyond economic loss." Plaintiffs substantiate these concerns by stating, "Lt. Thatcher has received multiple phone calls from AZCOPS members inquiring about the matter and waiting on updates regarding whether Sergeant Mullen's rights will be respected."

Importantly, however, "there must be a sufficient causal connection between the alleged irreparable harm and the activity to be enjoined and showing that the requested injunction would forestall the irreparable harm qualifies as such a connection." In other words, "there must be a showing that the chilling of the right to speak will be thawed by the entry of an interim injunction." Plaintiffs have not convinced the Court that temporarily placing Sgt. Mullen on paid administrative leave for the duration of this lawsuit would thaw any alleged chilling of other officer's right to speak. Accordingly, the Court finds that preliminary injunctive relief is not warranted….

But the court's reasoning suggests that a claim for damages would indeed be sufficiently supported to go to the jury.

The post The First Amendment and Off-Duty Police Officer's Counterprotest of Anti-ICE Student Protest appeared first on Reason.com.

Ayn Rand Is Alive in Ankara

2026-05-22T21:23:06Z

There is one Ayn Rand-themed establishment in Turkey. It isn't in Istanbul, the financial heart of the country, but Ankara, its political capital, home to Turkish bureaucrats and defense companies. The logo of Catalyst Coffee & Hub is a black-and-white picture of Rand holding a steaming cup of coffee. It is perched on top of Çankaya Hill, surrounded by embassies and official buildings. Its garden has a wonderful view of Atakule, the iconic tower overlooking the city.

When the cafe launched, a tax inspector came for a start-of-business check. When he saw copies of Rand's work on the bookshelves, he was delighted and engaged his hosts in an enthusiastic discussion of Objectivism. When he departed, he did so without looking at Catalyst's accounts.

Turkey's major political traditions of the past two generations—Kemalist secular statism, political Islam, and ethnic nationalism—all subordinate the individual to a collective project in different ways. Rand is countercultural against all three, and yet she articulates something that life in Turkey has quietly become: more individualist, more disenchanted, more on the hustle. That is why her readers pop up in unexpected places, and why they have been multiplying for over half a century.

Today, the political scene is more conducive to young readers of Rand than ever before. The big political traditions on the left and right have decayed so much that very small groups like the libertarians and Objectivists no longer seem squeezed in the middle. As President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's hold on power has tightened, the intrinsic appeal of Islamism has weakened—he now rules through coercion rather than conviction. Liberals and leftists of various stripes are finding it hard to organize politically, tap into capital, or even maintain their presence in media and cultural life. Where Randians looked like a small group squeezed on two sides, they are now one group among a constellation of free-floating political groupings, each of different shapes and sizes.

How Ayn Rand Arrived in Turkey

Rand was first translated into Turkish as a romantic novel. Biz İnsanlar (literally "We humans," ergo, We the Living) was released by a small publisher in 1974, with a cover depicting a blonde woman being embraced by a handsome man. There were other small translations in the following years, but their quality and circulation volume remained low.

It was in the 1990s that Rand hit Turkey's political scene, at a time when liberalism was ascendant in the country. Turkey had been ruled since the 1920s by a secular establishment that saw itself as the heirs of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the leader of Turkey's war of independence and founder of its secular Republic. The Kemalist-dominated military frequently carried out coups against elected governments that they saw as a threat to Atatürk's values. By the 1990s, the Kemalists were engaged in a culture war against Turkey's Islamists, whose base was growing, largely as a result of massive urbanization. In their fight against the establishment, the Islamists' allies were Turkey's classical liberals. Intellectuals like Atilla Yayla, Etyen Mahçupyan, and Ali Bayramoğlu were secular in outlook, but believed that the Kemalist republic was inherently repressive.

Tensions increased when the Welfare Party, the prime Islamist outfit at the time, won a plurality in the 1995 election, and in 1996, formed a coalition government, making its leader, Necmettin Erbakan, prime minister. On February 28, 1997, the military launched what is still known as a "postmodern coup," threatening military intervention without carrying it out. The generals' threats succeeded at forcing Erbakan out of power, and purging Islamists and their sympathizers from public institutions, especially politically sensitive ones like higher education and the judiciary. To liberals, the military was now the central collectivist force of Turkish public life, and therefore the obstacle that prevented the flourishing of individual liberties.

In 1997, the Journal of Liberal Thought (Liberal Düşünce Dergisi, LDD), the flagship publication of Turkish liberals, published a translation of Rand's 1964 interview with Playboy. Burak Bilgehan Özpek, who is arguably Turkey's preeminent liberal intellectual today, remembers this as a significant moment in his personal development. He says that Yayla, a well-known liberal intellectual of the time, "said that one should really embrace one philosopher, and I chose Rand." But copies weren't easy to find at the time. As a university student, Özpek took a trip to Fırat University, located in relatively poor southeastern Turkey. "They had a library donated by an American university, and there was a copy of The Fountainhead," he says, "and I stole it." He thought of it as finding a diamond in the rough, and in his defense, he was hardly selfish with Rand's texts. He remembers translating sections of her writing by hand, having them printed on pamphlets, and distributing them on the streets.

A New Political Opening for Objectivism

As Turkey rolled into the new millennium, a political earthquake broke open new ground.

In the wake of the postmodern coup, a group of young Islamists wanted to reform the Welfare Party. When their leadership bid failed, they splintered and formed their own outfit. On August 14, 2001, the Justice and Development (A.K.) Party was born, and its tall, handsome leader declared in his inaugural speech that "after this day, nothing will ever be the same again." This party was more moderate in its own Islamism, and more liberal in both social and economic policy. Reaching out to the E.U. and the U.S., it was able to mollify the military and govern the country. Liberals stood firmly with the A.K. Party, and its outspoken leader—Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Rand's presence in Turkey would enjoy a major upgrade during the early 2000s. Rasim Ozan Kütahyalı is known today as a celebrity political commentator, TV soccer analyst, and all-around enfant terrible of the Turkish media. As a teenager from a Kemalist household in the 1990s, Kütahyalı was caught up in the wave of anti-Kemalist liberalism. He also read Rand's Playboy interview and quickly sought out the works of this mysterious thinker who was originally from Russia.

In 2002, the 22-year-old Kütahyalı was introduced to Sinan Çetin. Çetin was a director with critically acclaimed films in the 1990s. In 1999, he released Propaganda, perhaps the only libertarian movie ever to be made in Turkish: a surreal comedy about a customs officer on the Turkish-Syrian border, following state directives to split his hometown in two. The film's star cast and international reception elevated Çetin's name as a serious director with a political mission.

Kütahyalı recalls that during their first meeting, Çetin asked him what he thought of his work. Instead of the lavish praise Çetin was used to hearing, Kütahyalı told him that Çetin lacked a "başyapıt" (magnum opus) "even though you have great potential." This got Çetin's attention. The two kept talking, and bonded over, among other things, their love for Rand. Çetin purchased the rights for Rand's work in Turkish, and with Kütahyalı's help, promoted the books through Plato Film Publishing.

In his introduction to The Fountainhead, Çetin wrote a classic Randian rendering of human history, in which a few creatives have pursued their creative potential but have been shunned by society. While some countries had managed to overcome this pattern, Turkey remained an egregiously regressive country. As Çetin wrote:

If The Fountainhead had been read in Turkey; no ideology would have superseded reason, and instead of being a haven for zealous militants, Turkey would have become a country of professionals. Doing a job well, respecting one's work, and achieving success in that work would not be so disparaged; people would not be ashamed of what they do, of producing, and of earning money.

This book in your hand is a SHIELD OF THE MIND to prevent the world from being destroyed by the peddlers of sacrifice. It is a defense of the 'I' and a reward given to creators who stand against the masses.

Çetin clearly wanted to use his growing clout to fashion himself into the champion of the creative classes in Turkey. In disseminating Rand, he would give creatives permission to be as they were, and to push back against the psychological impact of regressive forces on the left and the right. Academics and leftists firmly opposed Çetin in this.

In 2003, the backlash showed up in print. The academic Ayşe Kadıoğlu saw the emergence of Rand readership in Turkey as a sign of a greater malaise and published a critique in Radikal II, a highly influential feuilleton at the time. She looked back on a civic-minded liberalism at the Republic's founding—most significantly in Ahmet Ağaoğlu—in which altruism was the road that led to individualism. Kadıoğlu argued that when President Turgut Özal unleashed market deregulation in the 1980s, the public's spirit of altruism began to atrophy. What emerged, she claimed, was the mentality of "I will save my ship, everyone else can do as they please" and that when "a delayed individualism fuses with an Orientalist mindset, this is the result."

Leftist alarm notwithstanding, Rand's books weren't quite selling themselves. They needed a bigger cultural vehicle to attach to, and none of Çetin's other ventures were bigger than the TV sitcom Avrupa Yakası (The European Side) which ran from 2004–2009 and became a megahit. In it, Gülse Birsel (who also wrote the show) played Aslı, a tall, fashionable journalist living in Istanbul's fancy Nişantaşı district. Her counter was the magazine's administrative manager Burhan Altıntop, masterfully played by Engin Günaydın. Burhan was a new arrival to the city, with a thick Anatolian accent, forever striving to get ahead by following the latest fad, but failing spectacularly every time. The cultural clash between the cities and the countryside, "white Turks" and "black Turks," was on full display here.

The show had a huge impact, especially appealing to a white-collar, university-educated demographic that was excited about Turkey's E.U. aspirations. Careful viewers could see Rand's books as set decoration, or in one scene, the office tea boy's reading material. Kütahyalı also wrote for the show, and says that Birsel "didn't have a clue, we put those references in." Asked if this was an evangelizing effort of sorts, he says it was, but that "there was also a commercial concern. We wanted to sell books."

Perhaps it was too subtle, because Rand didn't stick. In a 2007 interview in Hürriyet, Çetin lamented that his publishing house was having a difficult time with her:

It's not selling. Being collectivist sells better. Because collectivism is a place where people feel better about themselves. "Let's all be happy together, together, together…" But we have a saying, "wherever there is a crowd, there is shit!" [nerede çokluk orada bokluk]

The broader trend of liberalism too, came under a different kind of pressure at this time. In 2010, the A.K. Party proposed a constitutional change that was designed to break the stranglehold of Kemalist elites on the judiciary. Many liberal intellectuals supported the measure with the slogan "Yetmez Ama Evet" ("Yes but not enough,") while most of the left and Kemalist nationalists opposed it. The referendum passed, forever implicating the liberal name with the A.K. Party's efforts to reshape the state.

In 2013, a small youth gathering to protect Gezi Park in Istanbul from a construction project erupted into a nationwide protest movement, and was harshly suppressed by the Erdoğan government. Some liberal intellectuals were uncomfortable with the protests. Atilla Yayla, who by this time was working with Çetin's publishing house, argued the protests were antidemocratic. Randians, however, Özpek argues, were consistently against Erdoğan, and therefore supported Gezi. "In times of crisis, morality [ahlak] is important," he argues, "for them [Rand readers] it was about dictatorship."

The space for individualism now began to shrink, not least due to a civil war in the Islamist camp. The A.K. Party's rise was supported by a religious order, led by the preacher Fethullah Gülen, who commanded a network of foundations, schools, and media outlets, as well as a huge covert presence in the country's bureaucracy, which effectively attacked the old Kemalist elite. It is difficult to think of a group that is as far away from Randian Objectivism as the Gülenist movement, which demanded intense personal loyalty to a charismatic leader. But the A.K. Party fell out with the Gülenists, and after a 2016 coup attempt that Erdoğan blamed on the group, the Turkish state began a new wave of mass institutional purges.

The Next Generation of Ayn Rand Readers

Rand's sales reportedly fell during these years. "You could only find expensive copies on the secondhand market, and then only of Atlas Shrugged," says Orçun Koçak, a co-founder of the Turkish Objectivist Network. And yet, it was in this environment that a new generation of Rand readers took to the texts.

Koçak was from a Marxist family. His father had been arrested after a 1980 military coup and tried for capital offenses. Koçak was in high school in the early 2000s, the A.K. Party's early years, and began to be interested in liberal ideas. One of his friends recommended Atlas Shrugged, and he got hooked. He overcame the idea that "intellectual life is inherently leftist," and began to talk about Randian morality to his family. They thought it was a phase. "They have only recently accepted that it wasn't," he says.

As a student in Ankara's TOBB University of Economy and Technology, Koçak was spending time with a group of gamers who liked playing DotA (Defense of the Ancients), a modification of the real-time strategy game Warcraft III. "These types of games have a culture of chatting for hours via Discord" he says, and it was during those hours that they would discuss liberal ideas (Turkey would ban Discord in 2024). These gamers thought that the left had failed to stop the rise of the A.K. Party, and that consequently, the country was now heading toward authoritarian rule.

In contrast to the first-wave of 1990s readers, this second wave of Rand readers seem to be disproportionally gamers. Merve Karataş, a highly active libertarian (and very long-shot candidate for mayor of Istanbul in 2024) who also reads Rand, says that gaming is conducive to the ideology. "It's an individual activity, and it develops your imagination," she says. She also thinks that it helped her grasp of economic principles. Playing the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, "you buy up the entire supply of a certain product on the market, then sell it for a higher price," she says, "so you learn about the market economy."

One gamer Koçak met at this time was Özgür Özer, who was a student at Middle East Technical University (METU). Özer was more strictly Randian in his tastes. "Classic liberalism's problem is that it doesn't have an aesthetic understanding," he says. He believed that the Turkish public was a lot more individualist than it led on. His father ran for local office in Ankara in 2009, and it was while working on that election, and talking to shopkeepers at the time, he concluded that "people don't want interference in their economic lives. They want to find their own way." By the time he was in college, he was already involved with liberal groups.

In 2019, Özer and Koçak joined forces and applied for funding to establish the Turkey branch of the Objectivist Network. The project allowed them to launch years of organizing workshops and training sessions. Perhaps the most important thing it did, however, was to put pressure on the publishing house.

Plato Film Publishing had gone dormant, and Pegasus Publishing now owned the rights to Rand's works in Turkish. The problem was that it wasn't printing any. Özer and Koçak reached out to Pegasus and asked if they could buy the rights. Under Turkish contract law, Pegasus' failure to print Rand's titles made them vulnerable to acquisition ventures. Koçak thinks that their offer put pressure on Pegasus, and instead of selling the rights, they rushed to print Rand again. "[The Turkish Objectivist Network] became their best customer," says Koçak, who bought many copies to be distributed at their events.

Ayn Rand's Growing but Complicated Legacy

Turkey is also more individualist than it has ever been. It is an industrial powerhouse and a rising star on the geopolitical stage, yet is suffering more malnutrition, organized crime, drugs, and school shootings. Nearly a decade of sky-high inflation has wiped out some people's earnings, and made others into expert speculators, hedging into dollars, gold, cryptocurrencies, and side businesses. Kütahyalı today has a reputation for praising Erdoğan's genius ("he is Howard Roark!") and kicking the opposition when it is down, but even he is candid about what he sees as contempt of the poor. "Turkey is 'business-friendly,'" he says, using the English expression, "but that is not liberalism." Perhaps he is in a position to know. Kütahyalı was arrested on May 14 on charges of forming a criminal organization, illegal betting, aggravated cyber-enabled fraud, bribery, and laundering proceeds of crime—all of which he rigorously denies.

In the meantime, Rand's Turkish readership has been growing, as evident in their robust online presence. The Turkish-language Wikipedia page on Rand is substantial, easily longer than those of Martin Heidegger, Jürgen Habermas, Émile Durkheim, or F.A. Hayek. On Ekşi Sözlük, a uniquely Turkish forum that works like a crossover between Wikipedia and Reddit, Rand's characters have their own pages with long commentaries and debates.

It is difficult to get sales figures, but kitapyurdu.com, the biggest online bookstore in Turkey, is well stocked with Rand's books (including a 13-book box set), and its online forum hosts a lively discussion of the works. YouTube searches for Ayn Rand in Turkey (one of the most popular modes of dissemination now) were flat until 2018, when they began to increase—peaking in 2023, but now maintaining a steady hum. Turkish philosophy YouTubers like Diamond Tema have made introductory videos about Rand's work and host discussions about the ideas.

Rand is still not considered respectable reading by the mainstream. In February 2026, the office of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the imprisoned mayor of Istanbul and the opposition's nominee for the presidency, mentioned in a post on X that Rand's We the Living was on the mayor's prison reading list. This received a strong reaction among leftists online. "The left hates her. Really hates her," says Özpek, who has himself become more critical of Rand's work, and now describes himself more as a "Hume-Hayek" liberal. Çetin is also no longer a champion. In 2016, he retreated from public life after his son, a serial traffic violator, crashed his sportscar into a police vehicle, killing an officer and wounding another. The case became a scandal about elite impunity, especially as Çetin was said to have offered money to the family of the deceased officer to keep them quiet.

For a generation now, the spirit of Turkish politics has been reactionary. Its most visible manifestation is the Islamist revolt against the secular, Western-looking republic of the Kemalists. Rand's appeal in Turkey too, rests not simply on ideas of managing the economy or daily life, but on the alternative values she proposes, ones that are implicit in daily life. An Ekşi Sözlük entry by the username nekadarolabilirki puts it best:

I have just read The Fountainhead. even though I do not agree with the writer on every topic, egoist morality seems so natural to me that it is as if these views have always been with me.

I was someone who lived by this mindset for years before reading this book, and now I understand better what I am.

production and self-centeredness equals happiness.

p.s. not for everyone

The post Ayn Rand Is Alive in Ankara appeared first on Reason.com.

Today in Supreme Court History: May 26, 1868

2025-07-12T04:46:35Z

5/26/1868: Senate acquitted President Andrew Johnson and adjourned as court of impeachment. Chief Justice Chase presided over that trial. Johnson is one of four presidents that did not appoint any Supreme Court Justices. The others are William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Jimmy Carter.

President Andrew Johnson

The post Today in Supreme Court History: May 26, 1868 appeared first on Reason.com.

Adam Carolla on the California Exodus, Gavin Newsom, and Mainstream Media

2026-04-24T19:19:53Z

https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/d2h6a3ly6ooodw.cloudfront.net/reasontv_audio_8373463.mp3

:15 :15

Download

Adam Carolla: Why No One Under 30 Trusts Legacy Media

In a recent interview, veteran journalist Katie Couric asked California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, whether being "so ridiculously good-looking" made it harder for him to be taken seriously. For podcaster and former Comedy Central host Adam Carolla, that exchange captured much of what's wrong with media and politics today.

In a March conversation with Nick Gillespie, Carolla talks about how legacy media traded skepticism for access and how California's dysfunction makes everything more expensive and time consuming.

Q: Let's start by talking about Katie Couric. Why did that interview set you off?

A: Here's what I realized with journalism: There's this sad tacit agreement, which is you can't ask tough questions or follow-up questions because then that person would never come back. Gavin Newsom did my show 13 years ago, and he's never come because I asked follow-ups.

Q: It was a tough interview, but it was not a hostile one.

A: No, it was not hostile at all. I just kept asking. People don't do it now because Katie wants to get Gavin again down the road after he announces he's running for president. But that's not journalism. Journalism is asking the questions. If everyone just did it at once, then they wouldn't have a choice because there'd be no friendly confines for them to go. If all journalists started acting like journalists and we all did it at once, then they'd still have to come back to you. They just have to answer your questions.

Q: What should Couric have asked Newsom?

A: There's a bottom line, which is: "People are leaving California. Why?" Then he'd go, "We have the fourth-largest economy," and they go, "OK, well, there's a perception about California, and maybe they're all wrong, but they're still packing up U-Hauls and leaving. You're telling me it's the greatest place in the world, we've never been better, fine. There goes another U-Haul for Texas. Venture a guess as to why they're leaving."

Q: Talk a bit about one of your ongoing complaints about California. How does the state artificially make it so difficult to build and maintain housing?

A: I'll give you a perfect example: California would love everyone to put solar panels on their house. I bought a big sprawling place on top of Lake Hollywood, a big Spanish place. It was in very bad shape, and I was going to do a huge renovation on it. There was space on one of the roofs and one part of the house that was big and broad and flat and I said, "I want solar panels on this roof." I'm not an environmentalist, but fine, if I can generate kilowatts from the sun and a little less out of my pocket, a little less coal burning, then good, I'll do it. I started to talk to some solar guys and plan out putting solar panels on my roof. I was told that in California, maybe it was even Los Angeles, the problem was that there needed to be a main shut-off for the solar that was outside of the front gate. Meaning, if there's an issue—I don't know what the issue would be, but—the fire department could hit the master on it. In every other municipality and every other state, that solar shut-off was on the panel, the electrical panel. The fire department could come in, see the panel, see the big solar shut-off, and shut it. The regulation in Los Angeles was it had to be separate and on the street. Well, the gate was 200 feet from where the solar panels were, and by code, I needed a 2-foot-deep trench with conduit, the 2-inch-wide conduit that ran, and I was like, I'm not going to pay a hundred grand to put a switch.

So you know what I said? "Fuck solar." I had no solar. I didn't pay for solar. I didn't get solar, the solar company didn't get money, we didn't save anything, more kilowatts, more fossil fuel. They made it too difficult for me to get solar. They look at that as sort of a win—not me not getting solar but more safety, more safety, more rules, more regulation.

Q: Newsom and the regulators, at some level, must understand this. Where does common sense come back into the equation?

A: First off, I do not know what Newsom understands. I'll tell you this about regulators. You go, "Well, they must understand." Regulators make regulations. It's in the title. I used to have this saying about producers in Hollywood, but I'll say this about regulators. I said, if you take beavers and you put them on the roof of the Empire State Building, they start looking for wood to build a dam. And someone goes, "What do you need a dam for? We're 2,000 feet in the air." The answer is, "We're beavers. This is what we do." They're regulators, they make rules. Get rid of rules, they add them, and they keep adding.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

The post Adam Carolla on the California Exodus, Gavin Newsom, and Mainstream Media appeared first on Reason.com.

Brickbat: Cop Out

2026-05-25T22:31:33Z

A Colorado jury awarded former New Jersey investment manager Robert Dial $24 million after finding that a police detective wrongfully arrested him in connection with a 2022 shooting involving Dial's son. According to the lawsuit, Detective Shannon Brukbacher of the Parker Police Department was upset that Dial hired a lawyer for his son, and she repeatedly pressed him for information, even though Dial was in another state and had told his son to cooperate with police. Brukbacher later accused Dial of helping hide a gun, even though officers found it immediately at the scene, and prosecutors dropped the charges just a few weeks later. The arrest permanently cost Dial his license to work in the financial industry, effectively ending his career. Although the jury ruled in Dial's favor, Brukbacher is retired and likely does not have enough money to personally pay the judgment, meaning Dial will probably never collect most of the judgment.

The post Brickbat: Cop Out appeared first on Reason.com.

Open Thread

2026-05-26T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

The Foreign-Born Heroes Who Chose America

2026-05-23T23:35:07Z

When Justice Neil Gorsuch recently described America as a "creedal nation"—one defined by ideas rather than bloodlines—it sparked a debate. But Gorsuch is right about this: America is based on the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, not heritage.

America's unique capacity to attract and assimilate people from around the world has proven this thesis since its founding. From the American Revolution to today, foreign-born individuals have fought for America—not because they shared a lineage with native-born Americans, but because they believed in America's principle of individual rights and chose to defend it.

Perhaps the most famous example of a foreign-born revolutionary is that of the Marquis de Lafayette. In his memoirs, he recalls hearing King George III's brother mock the ideals of the American Revolution at a 1775 dinner—and immediately resolving to learn more and join the cause. "My heart was enlisted and I thought only of joining my colors to those of the revolutionaries," he later wrote. The Marquis sailed to these shores at age 19 and fought in many battles, including Yorktown in 1781, where he played a crucial role.

Lafayette chose to fight for America after he became enamored with the cause for independence. In 1778, he wrote: "The moment I heard of America I loved her; the moment I knew she was fighting for freedom I burnt with a desire of bleeding for her; and the moment I shall be able to serve her, at any time, or in any part of the world, will be the happiest of my life."

He wasn't the only foreigner who felt this profound reverence for this country, even though he didn't have any prior connection to it.

Prussian-born military officer Baron von Steuben is regarded as one of the fathers of the United States military. Recruited by Benjamin Franklin, the veteran officer joined the Continental Army to professionalize its ranks. Appointed temporary inspector general and dismayed at the state of the Army, von Steuben developed a training program that radically improved the Americans' abilities to fight the war. His role was instrumental in the American victory, and the military regulations he developed continued assisting military efforts until 1814.

Though he did not share a language with the Americans, von Steuben shared their devotion to freedom. "The honor of serving a respectable Nation, engaged in the noble enterprise of defending its rights and Liberty, is the only motive that brought me over to this Continent," he wrote to Congress in 1777. To George Washington, he wrote: "The object of my greatest ambition is to render your Country all the Services in my Power, and to deserve the title of a Citizen of America by fighting for the Cause of your Liberty." An American in every respect except on paper when he fought, von Steuben became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1784.

Polish-born soldier Casimir Pulaski didn't get such an honor, as he died during the Siege of Savannah at 34. Pulaski's own words reveal his motivation to join the Revolutionary cause: "I came here, where freedom is being defended, to serve it, and to live or die for it," he wrote to George Washington.

Recruited for his military expertise and commitment to freedom, Pulaski eventually took command of the Pulaski Legion, a cavalry unit composed of American and foreign recruits. Like von Steuben, Pulaski didn't speak English, yet earned the titles of "Father of the American Cavalry" and "Soldier of Liberty" for his commitment to this country.

The pattern of foreigners defending America didn't stop after the Revolutionary War. Immigrants have fought in every war since then, and do so to this day (even in conflicts that often have little to do with the ideals they enlisted to defend, and even as the government moves to deport some of them). Per a recent congressional report, an estimated 50,000 non-U.S. citizens were serving in the Armed Forces as of February of 2026, and there are approximately 125,000 non-citizen veterans who previously served in active duty living in the U.S. (This figure doesn't count foreign-born veterans who have become citizens.)

Among those who served is Alfredo Rascon Velasquez, a Mexican-born veteran who originally entered the country illegally and won the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War. He eventually became a U.S. citizen. "I was always an American in my heart," he said when asked why he had volunteered to join and go to Vietnam before he was even a citizen. He describes himself as "Mexican by birth, American by choice."

A key thread in all these cases is that they reflect a first-hand, purposeful admiration for American values, not sacrifice or blind devotion for an inherited cause imposed on them. These individuals understood that they had something to gain: They fought for the country they wanted to live in, knowing that America's revolutionary principle of individual rights enabled the freedoms they wanted to enjoy. Their Americanism and commitment come from understanding these principles, not from "ethnicity" or tribal duty.

America is, as Gorsuch said, a nation based on the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, and these ideas have persuaded millions across the world for 250 years. The foreign-born men and women honored on Memorial Day made a version of a choice millions of immigrants make every day: to embrace a country defined by individual rights, not bloodlines.

This column was first published in the Orange County Register.

The post The Foreign-Born Heroes Who Chose America appeared first on Reason.com.

Today in Supreme Court History: May 25, 1861

2025-07-12T04:41:43Z

5/25/1861: John Merryman arrested. Chief Justice Taney ruled that his detention was unconstitutional in Ex Parte Merryman.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: May 25, 1861 appeared first on Reason.com.